Archive of Our Own

Ilya Rozanov has a primetime game on a night that the Metros don’t play. Raiders versus Anaheim’s Mallards. West Coast time, far later than Shane normally stays up during the season. Rest is extremely important for performance, for safety. Overtired muscles can strain and snap and break. Just a few hours of missed sleep can have as much of an impact on the brain as a six-pack of beer. Shane read that in a magazine article his dad sent him, once. He’s been dutifully pulling eight hours a night ever since.

So it’s weird. That he gets himself ready for bed, brushes his teeth, showers, and then finds himself leaving his bedroom and padding down the stairs to the first floor of his condo instead, flipping on the television, sliding onto his couch. It’s weird that he turns the volume up on the pre-show, listens to the commentators, two retired guys and a female sports reporter, talk about Rozanov’s stats, and the scoring race, and of course, the rivalry stuff, because Shane is leading in points and Rozanov is in a close second. His own name is mentioned in the first thirty seconds. It makes his brain itch.

He pulls his phone out, swipes it open, but then he just sits and stares at his screen, at the picture of the Metros crowding around the Stanley Cup from 2015 that’s been his phone background for a year. He has the urge to text someone about the Raiders game. He has the urge to send a chirp. To whom?

He opens up his messages and scrolls through the list of names. Settles on Hayden.

Hey, are you watching the Boston - Anaheim game?

Hayden texts him back a few minutes later.

No. Why the fuck would I want to do that?

Shane puts his phone down. Glances up at the screen, but it’s just advertisements. There is a woman, sitting on a beach, looking serenely out at calm ocean water. It looks like an ad for psoriasis medication. Shane picks his phone back up, tuned half on the television so he doesn’t miss puck drop. The voiceover on the screen carries the distinct therapeutic hum of prescription advertising, the kind that is meant to lull you through a list of disastrous side-effects.

… If you are having trouble moving on from traumatic past experiences, we can offer…

… combining state of the art… minimally invasive… EMDR and gestalt-based modalities…

… performed in the comfort of… no recovery time…

… Visit Lacuna dot com or call…

Shane glances back up at the screen. The camera has shifted, panned beyond the woman on the beach, to show a man and two children running toward her. She greets them in a very heavy-handed slow motion hug. Everyone is smiling. The voiceover is wrapping up with its final pitch.

… Take control again. Live your life fully.

The following commercial is for Loto-Quebec. It shows three overly enthusiastic twenty-somethings, winning scratch-offs.

Shane makes himself a little more comfortable on his couch, stretches out with a pile of pillows to prop his head and shoulder on top of. The commercials end. Just before ten, the Raiders pour out one-by-one from the tunnel, and the announcer calls Ilya Rozanov’s name last. The camera is pulled in tight enough that Shane can see a little half-cocked smile on Rozanov’s face, just before he glides onto the ice.

Shane feels a sudden and inexplicable jolt of nerves.

He watches the entire game, though he doesn’t really know why. He stares at the big black 81 on the back of Rozanov’s away jersey most of the time. The camera loves him, always panning around to him, even when he’s just on the bench, chewing on his mouthguard, or shifting his stick impatiently between his gloves in the penalty box. It sometimes swoops in close enough that Shane can see his blue eyes, glancing up at the jumbotron or the clock, or winking into the camera and blowing a sarcastic kiss with his big, bowed lips. There are a lot of signs in the audience for him, even in Anaheim’s house, which the camera loves, too. Marry me, 81. We love you, Ilya.

Shane keeps his phone in his hand, turning it over and over. It feels like there is someone he is supposed to talk to. This guy, Williams, on Rozanov’s line is too slow for him, doesn’t make himself open in the way Rozanov needs too many times, and Shane itches to tell someone that. He doesn’t know who. He thinks if he sends exactly that to Hayden, he’ll get back: fucking good.

He ends up texting it to his mom. She’s probably asleep, but she’ll have something to say about it in the morning.

The Raiders win, and Rozanov nets two goals and two assists. The commentators have a lot to say about that in relation to Shane. If Rozanov had a better line to work with, he’d be so far ahead of Shane in the scoring race, it wouldn’t be funny. Maybe that goes both ways, though.

Shane turns the game off at almost one AM. He’s going to feel this in the morning; the lack of sleep will drag on him like a hangover. He lays in bed, the lights turned off, his phone in his hand.

He should sleep. He wants to sleep.

He picks his phone back up and scrolls through the list of names. Who does he keep thinking he needs to text?

He thinks about Rozanov’s blue eyes, so sharp, the severe line of his jaw beneath his helmet. The pillow of his lips, pursed in a stupid kiss to the screaming audience. Something warm pools in Shane’s gut, heat in his cheeks, heat between his thighs.

Dumb, dumb shit. Shane can’t help the attraction, probably, the same-sex thing, even if he plans to go to the grave without acting on it. But he’s usually better than this. He doesn’t let himself get turned on by other hockey players, players he has to interact with at press conferences and games all season long. That’s just way too dangerous. Too distracting.

He thinks of Rozanov’s half smile, his crooked grin in the camera, and slides his hand into his shorts.

Stupid, he thinks, and jerks himself hurriedly, trying to get it over with. Rozanov’s strong jaw, his thick, tensed neck. The pink half-moons of his lips. His blue eyes, hard in the camera, looking through it, like they are looking at him.

Shane’s heart beats hard against his ribs. His breath catches. He stutters out an orgasm, flooding between his fingers. He pulls his hand out of his shorts and stares at himself a moment, disbelieving. Almost ten years in the league with Rozanov, and he’s sure he’s never done that before. He’s sure. Is he sure?

Shane feels gross, embarrassed, even though he’s alone. He wipes himself off on his t-shirt and pulls it over his head, tosses it to the edge of the mattress. He turns over in the dark, putting his phone face-down on the nightstand, and resolves not to do it again.

He goes to JJ’s friend’s party downtown and meets a movie star. She is pretty, and funny, and she puts her hand on his thigh so there are zero misunderstandings about what she’s interested in. She asks him for his number. She kisses him on the way out of the bar, and again before she climbs into her car, and she texts him before he’s even back home.

This shit has never been so easy for him. It has never felt even remotely as natural as this. Shane even feels a little flutter of excitement when her name pops up on his screen. Yes, finally. Finally, he thinks. He’s so glad he stuck it out this long, that he didn’t lose his resolve and sleep with a man along the way. He gets to be normal now, with a girl he thinks is really, really cool.

He has a dream that night, after the bar, about Ilya Rozanov.

Shane dreams that Rozanov sinks between his legs, here in his bed, and puts his big, grinning mouth on Shane’s dick and sucks him. He dreams that Ilya’s broad hands push his legs apart, that his mouth moves down, down, and licks him wet and hot around his hole. He dreams that his hands crawl their way into Rozanov’s hair, press into his curls, tug him around. He dreams of flipping onto his stomach and feeling Rozanov’s hard, heavy body all the way down his back and along his shoulders and against his neck. Rozanov’s hot mouth kissing behind his ear, as he pushes into Shane, splits him apart, and Shane pants more and please and then says nothing at all, just moans and shudders and comes on Rozanov’s dick.

Shane wakes up and feels like he’s violated Ilya Rozanov in some way. He feels guilty and weird and also turned on. He touches himself in the shower he has to take, after, and then feels worse.

Shane swears this has only started recently. When he thinks back to any interactions he’s had in the past with Rozanov, he barely remembers anything other than when they’ve faced each other on the ice. They went to the All Stars as rookies, he remembers; they made them do a bullshit press conference and barked questions at Rozanov he didn’t have the English to answer. Shane remembers that. He remembers Rozanov’s eyes looking almost scared, flickering to him.

He remembers filming a commercial, the two of them giggling at the exhaustion of the day, the stupidity of having to skate at each other over and over. He doesn’t remember much else. He thinks, maybe, Rozanov didn’t try to talk to him after they wrapped.

Rozanov is hot, fine. There are a lot of hot guys in hockey. There are hot guys on his team. Shane has never jerked off to any of them, or, like, had any weird sex dreams about them.

He’s probably nervous because Rose is famous and cool and pretty, and he doesn’t want to mess things up with her, so his brain is creating a weird anxiety spiral about the fact that he finds men attractive, too.

Or maybe it’s that their names are always mentioned together, the MLH still trying to milk every last drop of the rivalry they’ve played up since their rookie season, and subliminally, it’s starting to do something to Shane.

Maybe that’s it. It has been starting to piss him off, actually. He’s tired of answering questions about Rozanov in the media scrum, about whether he’s worried if Rozanov is going to beat him in the scoring race, about whether he’s hoping to play with him or against him in All Stars next year.

He watches one of Rozanov’s interviews. Okay, he watches all of them, the week after he has the dream.

“Shane Hollander has been having an outstanding season,” a reporter says, inanely, and pushes a mic into Rozanov’s face.

Rozanov looks like he’s biting down on a toothache, grimacing, not looking at the camera or at the reporter.

“I am sorry, is this question?” he sniffs, and his voice sounds flat. Angry.

“He is leading the league in goals and assists–”

“Okay? So? You know I do not play for Metros?”

The little circle of reporters around Rozanov, shirtless, sheened with sweat, titter at this joke, but Rozanov does not smile or wink or do any of the things he does for entertainment, for the kids at home. He holds his jaw tight and his lips pursed sourly, like he’s about to spit on the floor. He’s upset.

Shane would be upset too, he reasons, if he was being asked to speak about Rozanov at the end of a game for no fucking reason. Well, it’s never for no fucking reason. They are always neck and neck in points, every season, like clockwork. Since rookie season. Rozanov got a record that year. Shane would have, too, did in fact break the previous record, but Rozanov was there.

“Do you feel any pressure to get more points on the board, knowing the kind of season Hollander is having? Do you think the Raiders have what it takes to keep the Metros from a three-peat?”

“No. And yes. Anyone else?” The woman starts to speak again, but Rozanov cuts through. “No more questions about Hollander. You want to ask, I will call him, you can ask him on phone.”

The reporters laugh again. It’s a lie, of course. Rozanov does not have Shane’s phone number, he’s sure of it. Shane feels something low, curdling, in his stomach. Rozanov looks so upset. Shane thinks, if they did have each other’s numbers, for whatever reason, he’d text him about it. Say sorry, even though it isn’t his fault. Sorry that you’re being asked about me like this. Rozanov might think it was a chirp.

You played a great game. Sorry they just care about the rivalry bullshit. They’re trying to sell tickets.

But Shane doesn’t have Rozanov’s number, so he doesn’t. He just pushes his hand against his chest and rubs the bad feeling away into numbness.

He takes Rose out on a date, some vegan place she’s found in Montreal, and she holds his hand across the table and laughs at him, like he’s naturally funny and charming, and her nose crinkles up when she laughs and sometimes it’s not even cute, it’s a snorting, open mouthed laugh, and he likes that she isn’t trying to be too pretty for him. He feels so comfortable, holding her hand at the table. He likes how easy it feels for him.

He goes back to her place, after, the apartment they’ve arranged for her while she’s shooting in Montreal. He tries to hold onto the comfortable feeling they had together at the table, but as soon as he’s naked beside her in bed, he feels it all again. So nervous he can’t even get hard, even though he’s touching her and she’s guiding his hand into the damp void between her legs, making quiet little sounds with her mouth when he does what he thinks she wants there.

It’s okay, if it’s hard, he tells himself. It’s like a game. You have to concentrate. Get out of your head.

He rolls on top of her and palms himself, wedged between his body and hers, until he’s hard enough that he thinks she won’t notice how fucking weird he’s being about this. She runs her hands down his back and floats them through his hair and he tries to focus on kissing her, her soft mouth, small, full lips. Not at all like… like…

He closes his eyes. He thinks of Rozanov, pursing his lips at the camera, winking. His blue eyes, like sharp little chips of stone, the vein in his neck that Shane could see when he got angry enough at that reporter.

He gets hard.

After is a lot better. He likes laying in bed next to someone. He likes petting Rose’s soft hair, likes putting his face in it and smelling something not too feminine. He saw the long bottle in the shower, santal. She smells like whatever santal is. He thinks about that, that smell, and explicitly does not think about anything else that happened tonight, in the bed or in his brain.

He dreams about Rozanov again, with his arms around Rose and her little body slotted up against his. His fault, probably, because he thought about him, for some reason, before. During. In the dream, Rozanov stands at the edge of the bed and Shane, fuck. Shane mouths at his dick through his pants, through his underwear, like he’s desperate to suck him.

In his dream, he is. He needs it.

There is a game coming up, Boston at Montreal. The ads for it that play between that lady on the beach with her happy, dream family– Sometimes we need help moving on. Lacuna can help– are all about Hollander and Rozanov. Their profiles scowl at each other from either side of the date and time at every commercial break when he’s watching a game. It makes him feel weird, every time. Unsettled, like he ate something bad. He had a stomachache after the vegan place. After that first time with Rose, but it was the vegan food, he’s sure of it. Too many ultraprocessed ingredients at that place. Trying to make something that isn’t a hamburger into one, or chicken nuggets, or spaghetti bolognese.

It feels like that, seeing his own face glaring at Rozanov’s face, who is a stranger to him. It feels unfair. Like he’s been cast in some play without knowing it. If he had known, he could have said no.

“It’s kind of stupid, right?” he says, on Hayden’s couch, with Jackie at another end, and the girls running around them and just out of reach of the babysitter. Another Hollander vs. Rozanov primetime ad has just finished on the screen. The lady on the beach is back, smiling at nothing.

“What’s stupid?” Hayden says.

“The rivalry thing. I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with Rozanov, but the story is we hate each other. It’s pretty stupid.”

And unfair, but Shane can’t really explain why it feels like that. Doesn’t really have a good handle on it, himself.

“I thought you hated him,” Hayden says, shrugging around his beer.

“I don’t even know him. I don’t know him enough to hate him.”

“He’s an asshole,” Hayden says, like this is self-evident. Reason enough.

“Would you do this?” Jackie says, hand waving toward the TV. “This Lacuna thing.”

The lady on the screen is hugging her little family. Shane looks at the scene impassively. It doesn’t feel like anything, watching the family smile and hug each other. Shane doesn’t feel like whatever the producer was intending for him to feel. Shane doesn’t feel anything.

Visit Lacuna dot com or call…

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Jackie says, rubbing her arm. But she continues, so she does know. “It’s a surgery, or something. I read an article about it. It’s for, like, traumatic memories. You have one session and you don’t even remember the thing that happened to you. And it’s permanent. They say it’s like, one hundred times as effective as therapy for stuff like that.”

“You’ve got traumatic memories, babe?” Hayden says, smirking like it’s a joke, but his eyes are a little worried.

Jackie reaches across Shane to rub her husband’s knee, like he isn’t even there. Sometimes, he likes that about hanging out with the two of them. He likes being a passenger to a bigger story. No eyes on him at all.

“Unfortunately for me, I remember way too much of my C-section with the girls,” she says. “I’ve thought about it. I’m surprised you haven’t, babe, you were probably more traumatized than me.”

“Yeah, fuck. I wasn’t even thinking about that.” Hayden cocks his head to think a minute. “I think I’d be afraid that they’d take too much out, maybe. Like, maybe I don’t want to remember the C-section, but I definitely want to remember cutting the cord, and that was like, thirty seconds later.”

“What about you, Shane?”

“I don’t,” he says quickly. Doesn’t even really know what he’s saying, at first. “I don’t have any, um, traumatic experiences, anything like that.”

Jackie does an involuntary shudder. “You are so lucky that you can’t get pregnant.”

The game comes on, and Shane stops thinking about Hollander vs. Rozanov.

Rose comes to his games. Shows the camera her jersey, as people go crazy. They look cute in the pictures that spread across the internet. Rose looks cute, always. She’s effortlessly pretty, and she buys stuff for Shane to wear that gives him a bit of an effortlessness, too, for the first time in his life. He doesn’t even feel bad to have gifts bought for him. If anything, she’s wealthier than he is. She’s the biggest movie star in the world.

She doesn’t pressure him to have sex, after that first time. She comes over to his condo to watch the game, and she sinks between his legs with the TV on, and it’s really, really easy to get hard for that. The Hollander vs. Rozanov promo is constantly plastered across the screen; Shane can stare right at the severe profile of Rozanov’s nose, and his tilted lips. They always look a little pursed. They are maybe the softest thing about him. Maybe the only soft thing.

He has her stop before he comes, and then he just finishes in his hand, and kisses her, and they sink back onto the couch together.

He dreams of Rozanov again, of course. He’s kind of given up on that not happening anymore. He watches all of the Raiders games he can reasonably catch, even gets chirped on the team bus for it, but it’s fine, because everyone just thinks he’s so locked in to the season that he’s keeping tabs on every single division team in equal measure. He’s not though. He’s not watching Toronto or Ottawa or even New York, unless it’s Boston playing them. He doesn’t give a fuck what Scott Hunter is up to. It’s Rozanov.

He tries to approach the dreams clinically, objectively. He’s attracted to men, sure. He’s known that his whole life. Attracted to Ilya Rozanov, more specifically. He doesn’t have to make that a big deal. It doesn’t have to be. Ilya Rozanov is attractive. He’s hot. Okay. He has a really nice face, nice eyes. His body is perfect. In Shane’s dreams, Rozanov sounds like he’s purring when he drawls out Hollander in his deep Russian accent. Shane is, apparently, really turned on by the idea of giving Ilya Rozanov a blowjob. Being fucked by him.

What does that mean? Does it mean anything? Does it have to? Maybe it can just be. He can have these dreams about another player he barely knows, and he can also have a normal sexual relationship with his pretty, fun girlfriend.

He looks at the Lacuna website, once. Just to see if the procedure fixes dreams. The FAQ explicitly says they cannot guarantee results on dreams, hallucinations, anything that isn’t based on a real event in someone’s life. The FAQ also states the procedure costs thirty-five thousand dollars. Shane doesn’t think the dreams are worth thirty-five thousand dollars to exorcise, even if it was effective.

Boston comes to Montreal, and he and Rozanov are sent in for the first face-off of the game. Shane crouches down across the dot and looks at Rozanov up close. He has his mouth pressed flat and his chin tucked down, and his eyes are not lifted to meet Shane’s. It reminds Shane a lot of the way that he looked during that scrum. Like Rozanov is so tired of hearing about Shane, talking about Shane, that it’s bleeding into how he interacts with him, too.

That settles sourly in Shane’s gut. I thought you hated him, Hayden had said. He wonders if Rozanov hates him. Or if he thinks Shane hates him, like everyone else seems to.

I don’t hate you, he wants to say. I don’t know you, but I don’t think I should hate you.

“Hi, Rozanov,” he says. He tries to make it sound friendly. Sound like maybe we shouldn’t play into this stupid thing.

Rozanov doesn’t look at him.

“Hollander,” he says.

It doesn’t sound like how it does in Shane’s dreams, Rozanov saying his name now. It sounds tight and forced. Choked.

The game starts. Shane wins the face-off, and Montreal wins the game, easily. Rozanov is barely a presence. He stays far away from Shane, doesn’t bully his way physically into taking possession of the puck, which is his one and only play style, so it isn’t a surprise that Boston loses and Rozanov doesn’t put up any points.

It tugs at Shane, in the locker room after. Maybe Rozanov hates him. Maybe the years and years of comparison between them, of always having his victories couched in how Shane has performed, every season, never allowed to stand on their own merits, has made Rozanov actually detest Shane.

Maybe Shane should have tried to talk to him before. He doesn’t really know why he hasn’t. He can’t remember ever thinking about it one way or the other. He wonders why the thought is only occurring to him now.

He’ll get his number from someone, he thinks, and pulls out his phone to text Rose, tell her he’ll meet her at the club where she’s complaining about the boring VIP and the bad music and asking him to come dance or she’s going to die there. He’ll make an effort to ease whatever the bad blood is between them. He doesn’t see any reason they can’t at least be civil with each other.

He stands in the middle of the sticky dance floor with her, with her damp hands up his shirt, and he looks around the room, and he sees Cliff Marleau and Connor Connors chatting up some girls, and he whirls his head the other way, and he sees Ilya Rozanov at the bar, or the back of his head, and his broad shoulders, hunched forward. He’s wearing a totally ridiculous shirt. Or maybe Shane is weird, for wearing a tee. He wouldn’t know. He hates clubs.

“I’ll be right back,” he says to Rose.

“Babe, you said you’d dance,” she says, a little whiny, in the way that girlfriends sometimes are with their boyfriends.

“I see Ilya Rozanov at the bar. I want to talk to him a little.”

And then Miles is back, with the champagne Rose asked for that Shane doesn’t want, and it’s fine to leave his pretty girlfriend alone in the club with her safe gay friend who is probably, probably flirting with Shane. But it’s okay, because he has a girlfriend. And he isn’t interested in this guy.

He isn’t interested in anyone.

“Hi,” he says, to Rozanov’s profile, illuminated in pink club lights. “Good game today.”

Because he’s already looking, at Rozanov’s slumped shoulders, his huge hands that make his drink look comically small, he sees Rozanov stiffen out, sees the way he goes from loose and shuffling around vaguely to the music to absolutely stock-straight and taut as a wire. Rozanov brings his head up, and his mouth flattens out, but he doesn’t turn and doesn’t look at Shane. He looks straight ahead. Like Shane isn’t worth turning to, or saying hi back to.

“What are you doing, Hollander.”

Something hot floods Shane’s whole chest. Embarrassment, humiliation maybe. It has that same kind of soft, hurting underbelly to it. Anger wrapping protectively around something much more pathetic.

“I’m just being… nice?”

Rozanov pushes his shoulders back. His chest fills out beneath his obnoxious shirt, a big breath in. Only after that, the breath in and back out, does he turn toward Shane. His eyes are just icy chips in the terrible club lighting, washed of color. His jaw is so tense it looks like it hurts to get any words out, and Rozanov barely tries.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Shane should probably stop now. It’s pretty clear that Rozanov hates him. Maybe the rivalry has been fake the whole time for Shane, but it seems that it’s real enough for Rozanov. “I’m just–”

“Don’t do this,” Rozanov says, “You said–” he abruptly stops talking, lockjaw over the rest of that sentence. “Never mind.”

“What? I haven’t said anything to you,” Shane says. He means it. He’s racking his brain, trying to think of one single time he’s ever given Rozanov a reason to act like Shane just walked up and propositioned his mother.

But he hasn’t done anything. He doesn’t remember ever talking to him, after that press conference as rookies. There is nothing he could have said. He’s been perfectly fine. Nice.

Rozanov stares at him. He looks angry, more fearsome than he looks even on the ice, when he’s breathing down Shane’s neck like a great white shark, smelling blood. He holds himself like he might cock a fist back and punch Shane at any moment.

Then, it shifts to something else. Not entirely; his jaw remains clenched, like he has a mouthful of blood he’s trying not to spit out. His posture is still tight and closed off and mean. But whatever the hostility is that is setting his eyes on Shane like that falls away, and they go big and blue and shining. And Shane stares at him, and doesn’t understand.

“No. You haven’t. Goodbye, Hollander.”

He leaves his drink, which doesn’t look touched, on the bar, and walks away. Shane watches him absorb into the crowd, come out somewhere on the other side, where his teammates were.

Shane’s heart is tight like a clenched fist, and his eyes are hot, and he doesn’t even know why. He staggers back to Rose, who is swaying with her eyes closed, holding her champagne flute up like the statue of liberty, Miles’ arms wrapped around her neck. Shane touches her waist and she flutters her eyes open and smiles her big, pretty-but-not-consciously-pretty smile at him.

“Hi, babe!”

“Hey. Um.”

He wants to ask her if she wants to leave. He doesn’t know why, but everything about that minute with Rozanov feels fucking awful and he wants to leave. He doesn’t want to be in this room anymore. Somewhere in this room, Ilya Rozanov fucking hates him. Hates him so much it looks like he was about to cry. And Shane is a grown fucking man and feels like he is also going to cry. Because a fucking stranger hates him.

That’s stupid. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. He doesn’t know what’s wrong. He doesn’t know what he did.

A very old song starts bleeding into the ambient dance music, something from middle school, and Miles and Rose shriek at each other, and Rose says, “Oh my god!” and she pulls Shane close to her, and she starts dancing against him. And Shane lets himself be held, and swayed, and danced with, and doesn’t ask her to leave.

And part of the way through that song, he sees Ilya Rozanov wrapped around a girl across the dance floor, kissing her.

He looks fine, again. Recovered, from whatever the fuck that was at the bar. He’s holding the girl all the way around her hips, and his hand is dipping suspiciously between her slightly spread legs, and her hands are up and in his hair and his face is dipped low against her neck, and he’s probably kissing it or licking it or sucking a bruise into it with his gleaming teeth. And she is loving it, whatever it is. Her eyes are closed and her mouth is parted in a soft ‘O’. She’s really pretty. She looks soft, and small, and it makes Rozanov look so big, so hard, in comparison.

Shane has had a dream where Rozanov kisses him like that. Mouths his neck and pumps his cock, while Shane leans back against him. It’s jarring, to see Rozanov looking a lot like he did in Shane’s dream, when Shane has just had such a disaster of an interaction with him. It’s so jarring that Shane thinks he is going to be sick. Thinks he’s going to throw up, right now, actually.

“Sorry,” he says, and pulls off Rose, and goes to the bathroom, and dry heaves into a toilet for five minutes.

Ilya Rozanov loses his next two games after Montreal, too. Shane watches them, even though he doesn’t know why he’s still bothering. Rozanov hates him. Rozanov plays like shit. If he always played like this, there would have never been talk of a rivalry to begin with. His slow lineman who doesn’t put himself where Rozanov needs him to go isn’t even the problem. He’s there when he needs to be there, and Rozanov isn’t.

Shane’s next game is away, Detroit. Rose jokes that she won’t fuck him if he beats them. “My family would never forgive me,” she laughs into the phone.

“Aw, babe,” he says, and swallows down how relieved he feels at the possibility that he really might not have to fuck her.

He has a room to himself at the hotel, all alone. He puts a game on the TV, North Carolina at Washington, DC. He feels that nag, again, that there is someone he would tell about this. No roomie tonight. Shame you aren’t here.

The shape of it, the person he thinks would want to know, is not shaped like Rose.

He scrolls through his phone during the advertisements. The lady at the beach. The kids and the husband. Minimally invasive, performed in the comfort of your own home. No recovery, no down time. Take back control. Live your life fully.

He thinks about Rozanov at the club. How his eyes dipped low and seemed to swim, even as the rest of his face shut down around his anger. Was it anger?

Maybe Shane did something. Maybe Shane should try and apologize. Or at least find out why.

He messages the Metros group chat. Does anyone have Rozanov’s number?

The Washington Monuments pour out onto the ice, the rink lighting up like a club.

Nobody has Rozanov’s number directly. A few guys chirp about it, Why the fuck do you want that asshole’s number? And, If you get it, tell him to suck my dick.

Miity says, Let me ask my buddy on the Guardians. He played a couple seasons on the Raiders.

Shane stretches out on the bed and watches the game. He keeps his phone in his hand. He wonders if Miity’s friend will respond tonight. Even if he did, what would Shane say? Hey, why do you hate me? What the fuck did I do?

Can we just talk? I just want to talk to you.

Shane blows out his breath and puts his phone very intentionally on the nightstand, face down. Makes it hard to reach for again. He’s being fucking weird. He’s being weird.

He thinks about Rozanov for too long and his dick starts to get hard. He rolls his palm over it, through his sweats, not even sure if he’s trying to make it go away or turn it into something. Fuck, he’s being so weird.

He should text Rose, if he wants to do this. Direct this energy toward someone who doesn’t hate his fucking guts.

End of first period. Shane rolls and gets his phone and pulls up some compilation on YouTube, helpfully labeled Rozanov vs. Hollander. It’s a bunch of clips of face-offs, and interviews, and reactions they’ve had to each other on the ice, ranked by, apparently, how funny or mean or intense the interaction.

In one, Rozanov stands before an array of microphones, his bare chest gleaming, enormous, all smiles, and his jaw looks sharp enough to cut through ice.

“Hollander? He is goalie now, yes?”

The video has subtitles, but only when Rozanov speaks, like he isn’t completely intelligible. Shane almost turns it off just for that. He is goalie now is ranked number eight.

Another clip of Rozanov and some reporters, huddled around his locker. Something about whether he thinks 2015 is Hollander’s year, or if the Raiders will pull off back-to-back wins. Hollander’s year, not the Metros’ year. The same kind of bullshit they’ve been pulling since 2009. Making it into something Hollander and Rozanov do alone, against each other, like forty other players who also make or break the game don’t even exist.

Rozanov makes an exaggerated face of pity, sweat dripping down his face and over the curved planes of his lips.

“Is so sad, for Hollander. Maybe if I was not in league, it would be Metros’ time. I think I will send him Raiders jersey when we knock them out of playoffs this year.”

Shane is touching himself even before the next clip queues up. He tracks the video back ten seconds, listens to Rozanov breathe out his name again. Hollander. Again. Hollander.

Again. This time he comes, right when the final ‘R’ rolls along Rozanov’s sweat-slick lips.

He watches the rest of the compilation like doing so will absolve him of the deviancy.

In one clip, rated the lowest on whatever metric this video uses, someone asks Shane if he wants to comment on Rozanov’s jokes about making fifty goals his rookie season, about being better than Shane.

“Not a chance,” Shane says. It’s a nice response. It’s sportsmanlike. Is that the worst anyone’s been able to find on him? The worst he’s ever been in the press to Rozanov? If so, he doesn’t understand. He’s been fine. He’s been nice.

Why does Rozanov hate him? What did he do?

There is a clip from April, last season. Metros versus Raiders, a shot of Shane and Rozanov on the side while a fight breaks out at center ice. Rozanov bends toward Shane, says something in his ear, pulls away. Shane looks at him, smiling. Rozanov is smiling too.

Shane pauses the video on their smiling faces, on the way he is looking at Rozanov, the way Rozanov is looking at him. They look happy. Some little conversation, the two captains laughing to themselves, off to the side of the fight.

Shane stares and stares, and wonders why he has no memory of it at all. It looks like such a happy moment. It looks like something he would have remembered.

Miity’s buddy doesn’t have Ilya Rozanov’s number, but he has Cliff Marleau’s number, who does. And so Shane gets Rozanov’s phone number eventually.

At home, on his couch, Shane turns on the Raiders game with his phone in his hands. He opens up the message Miity sent to him, with the phone number procured from Marleau.

Shane presses down on the number and copies it. Opens up a new message. He pastes the number into the To: field, and an existing contact pops up. Lily.

Shane stares at the name and waits for that to make sense. Why does he have Rozanov’s number saved under “Lily”? Did he ever talk to him before? Was it some kind of weird joke, and he’s somehow forgotten all about it?

Shane pushes knuckles into the space beneath his collarbone that’s gone tight, massages against the strange clench in his chest.

“And it’s Rozanov on the breakaway! Look at him go!”

Shane looks up at the screen. 81 big in the center, flying down the ice. A clean shot that sends the buzzer ringing. Looks like Rozanov is playing better, after that shaky week.

Shane’s thumbs fly over the phone. Nice goal. Then, This is Shane Hollander.

His fingers still. He doesn’t know what else to write.

No, he does. He does know.

Listen, if I did anything to you to piss you off, I’m sorry.

I know we don’t really talk, but I don’t hate you or anything.

I’m sorry if I did something to make you think that I did.

He forces himself to put his phone away after that.

The Raiders win. Shane gets up and pours himself some water, sips it in the kitchen while the post-game commentary ends and the evening news cuts on.

“Tonight at eleven, a new class action lawsuit filed against Toronto-based health technology startup Lacuna, as angry customers allege that traumatic memories, that they paid upwards of thirty-five thousand dollars to erase forever, suddenly returned without–”

Shane turns off the TV, and waits, and waits. Heads up to his bedroom, takes a shower, gets into bed. Stays up past eleven-thirty, much later than he would like. Waiting.

Rozanov doesn’t answer.

Shane thinks he may be delusional, or thinking wishfully, but the shape of the person he’s thought about texting while he watches hockey feels like Rozanov.

Definitely delusional, because Rozanov never answers him. Not after that first set of text messages, which feel almost humiliating, scrolling back through them. Shane would delete them, but he knows they are already out there, on Rozanov’s phone. Rozanov does not have Shane blocked, but that’s about all he knows.

Rozanov doesn’t answer him when Shane sees a car parked on the street in Montreal with a bumper sticker in the shape of a Raiders’ jersey, 81 adorned in bedazzled gold and black, and sends a picture of it to Rozanov.

Shane watches the Guardians game against Buffalo, knowing that Boston plays the Guardians later in the week, and texts: Guardians’ goalie is favoring his right side. High stick side shot should go in easy.

Rozanov doesn’t answer him then, either. But Shane watches the highlights of the Raiders versus Guardians game, after the Metros’ own game against Tampa that night, and sees Rozanov sink a perfect shot to the upper left corner, just like Shane suggested. Probably a coincidence, but it makes Shane feel warm, anyway.

The woman on the beach with her happy kids is replaced by an older man in glasses, fixing his grandson’s bike. Ask your doctor if Repatruda is right for you. If Shane had to guess, it’s probably arthritis medication.

All Stars weekend comes around, and Shane boards a plane in the middle of a snowstorm and deboards in eighty degree weather and ninety percent humidity. The Tampa airport is filled with hockey players, roaming through the baggage claim like a herd of buffalo with mullets and missing teeth.

He doesn’t see Rozanov until later, at the hotel, when Shane wanders downstairs and steps into the expansive ground floor lounge, open to the hot air but breezy with a million whirring ceiling fans. Rozanov is seated at a table with a few other players from the Eastern Conference. Carter Vaughn waves Shane over, his bare arm around Rozanov’s shoulders. The music is loud in the bar, and the guys are even louder, shouting to be heard.

“Hollzy!” Vaughn cries. And then, maybe just out of the excitement of getting drunk with a bunch of guys he’s normally trying to rip to shreds, he adds, “East boys! Whoo!”

Shane sits down, because he’s been called out by name. Across the table from Rozanov, who looks at him as flatly as if he were a stranger, not someone who has been blowing up his phone for the last couple of weeks. Shane feels like he’s being silently chastised, or something.

A waiter appears to take another round of orders. Shane looks at everyone’s beers collecting moisture in their hands, Rozanov’s included.

“I’ll have whatever my captain’s having,” Shane says, nodding at Rozanov’s Corona, and a couple of guys whistle.

“Come on, don’t bring that bullshit here,” someone, a guy from New Jersey, says.

“What is bullshit about this? I am his captain,” Rozanov says, neutrally. “Just because you all have no respect for title does not mean Hollander is chirping.”

Shane is so shocked that Rozanov is acknowledging him here, in front of these other guys, that he ends up just staring at Rozanov, watching how his eyebrows sit, like this is all boring him. How his mouth curves around the narrow lip of the bottle right before the beer flows down the neck of it. The waiter comes and puts Shane’s beer right in front of his face, and it takes him five incriminating seconds to notice.

“This is going to be fun,” Shane says, finally, nodding like someone asked him a question, even though nobody did. “We’ll finally be playing on the same team. The West doesn’t stand a chance.”

Vaughn and a couple of guys laugh at that. Rozanov makes a little incredulous noise.

“What?” Shane says, and he has to sip his beer, because his mouth is so dry.

“I do not know if you can play wing so well,” Rozanov says. “I think maybe you don’t know how to take directions.”

That feels like he isn’t talking about hockey at all. Shane thinks of the club, the stupid music blaring, Rozanov washed in pink, the way his teeth had bit down around the word Don’t. He realizes he has no idea what expression he’s making right now, if he’s still smiling, and if he is, if anyone else at the table can tell it’s not at all the way he feels. He feels a little terrified, even though Rozanov is looking at him kind of blandly. Or at least, everything but his eyes are bland. His eyes are sharp. They feel like they are looking right through him and out the back of his head.

Vaughn cuts in, jostles Rozanov around the shoulders. “Can’t take this fucking guy anywhere!”

And then it’s mercifully over, Rozanov’s attention drawn elsewhere. Shane doesn’t really hear the rest of the conversation. He picks at the damp label on his bottle and nurses his beer and leaves when the rest of the guys do, and Rozanov leaves, too, without even looking at him.

Shane does his job. He plays left wing to Rozanov’s center and they decimate the West, and Rozanov sets him up for a few beautiful goals and he helps Rozanov get a few of his own. What would it be like, if Rozanov actually liked him a little? How fucking incredible would they be on the ice together? Rozanov is wrong about him, Shane thinks. He does know how to take directions. There is a weird, dark part of him that thinks he would do whatever Rozanov told him to do. Except, apparently, leave him alone. Maybe even that, once Shane finally figures out what he did wrong. Maybe Rozanov will tell him, and that will be satisfying enough, and Shane will be able to live with the explanation. And then, he’ll be able to leave it alone.

Shane decides, on the final night of All Stars, that he is going to find Rozanov and just, like, talk. Just ask. He thinks, they played well enough together, in fact they played better than well enough. They played like they could read each other’s fucking minds, moving in sync, finding each other everywhere, without words. Even for this zero stakes, mostly bullshit game, it was exhilarating. And maybe, Shane hopes, it has afforded him the tiniest bit of goodwill with Rozanov. Enough, maybe, to ask him what it is about Shane that he can’t stand, that makes him avoid Shane like the plague. Maybe they can come to some kind of understanding.

He wanders around the ground floor of the hotel, through the bar, and the pool deck, and ducks into the restaurant, but Rozanov isn’t anywhere. Shane realizes pretty quickly that this plan, just looking around and hoping he’ll run into Rozanov somewhere that they can speak in private, kind of sucks, but he doesn’t really have any better ideas. He pulls out his phone, considers sending a text into the ether, but he knows Rozanov won’t answer, might not even be reading them. He might have a million people texting him, begging for his attention. Shane probably isn’t special at all, in that regard.

But he walks out onto the beach just as the sun is starting to dip low in the sky, burning the clouds pink and orange and rendering the water a gleaming slick of shining froth, and he sees Rozanov a little off in the distance, sitting on the sand, alone, like it’s destiny or something, like fate has lined this up for the two of them to meet.

Shane is probably being crazy, thinking like this, speeding up into a jog to reach him. It’s probably all just coincidence.

Shane sits down beside Rozanov, doesn’t think about how sandy his shorts are going to be, how it’s going to get everywhere in his bag later. Rozanov doesn’t turn when he does, but his eyebrows do a little jump, and of course he knows Shane is there. Shane is impossible to miss. It’s just the two of them on the beach like this, next to each other. There is no way to mistake that Shane is here to see him.

“Hey,” Shane says. He can’t stop looking at Rozanov’s face, at his eyes reflecting the sunset. Bright and lit up like flames, shining like the ocean.

Rozanov looks like he’s chewing down on something. Like he’s forming words the way spit pools in the mouth, rolling them around before he says anything. He doesn’t look at Shane. Again, Shane feels that hot little stab in his gut, between the ribs. It twists and twists as he waits for Rozanov to say something.

Rozanov finally speaks, to the ocean, not at Shane, and his voice sounds like the lowest register of the crashing waves glowing under the dimming sunlight.

“You are… really persistent, Shane Hollander. Like venereal disease.”

Shane laughs at that, even though he probably shouldn’t. He almost wants to ask Rozanov why he even knows the phrase venereal disease, but that sounds like he’s insulting his English. And he can’t say something like that to someone he doesn’t even know. Even if they just called him a fucking STD.

“Gross. You sound like my health teacher.”

“What is this, health teacher?”

“Never mind.”

Silence again between them, just roaring ocean and behind them, drunk hockey players jostling each other, the occasional splash from the hotel pool. Rozanov’s eyes are orange and red like the sun. His whole face glows with it, and the swell of his chest where his shirt is buttoned low does, too.

Shane tries to read the curl of Rozanov’s pretty mouth, the set of his eyebrows. He’s never been good at this, at picking out what people are feeling if they don’t just tell him. He wishes he was, all the time, but never more than right now, when Rozanov seems tense and clouded with something, but is still sitting here, letting Shane be this close to him.

“Sorry if I’m being annoying,” Shane says, and it’s a guess at what Rozanov might be thinking, but Shane is hoping he’s wrong.

It matters so much to him, for some stupid reason. Maybe Rozanov knows the reason. Maybe he can tell Shane why the fuck Shane can’t let this fucking thing go.

Rozanov’s mouth twists upward, just a little, at the corners.

“No, you’re not.”

“Not annoying?”

Rozanov’s eyes flicker to his, and it’s a personal lightning strike, an electric shock Shane feels all the way down his spinal column.

“Not sorry.”

Shane opens his mouth for just a little choked breath of nothing to escape. Not even a laugh, just shock from it. From Rozanov looking at him, all the force of his presence bearing down on Shane. They are not sitting close enough to touch, of course, but Shane’s whole body is trying to turn that way, to swoon toward Rozanov, like he’s a planet with a gravity too strong for Shane to evade.

This is the longest he thinks they’ve ever spoken to each other. This is the longest Rozanov has ever tolerated him, in his memory. Rozanov’s sitting here, beside him, in front of this beautiful ocean and picture postcard sunset and he’s looking at Shane instead. And the way he’s looking at him, the way it’s making Shane feel right now… he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand any of it.

And Shane has nothing rehearsed, so what comes out is just the barest version of the question he can’t stop fucking thinking about, can’t stop asking himself:

“I just… It bugs me. That I don’t know. I don’t know what I did to make you hate me.”

Everything on Rozanov’s face pitches downward, like the blackened wick of a candle someone has abruptly blown out. Wilted, uneven. Shane wonders what his own face must be doing right now.

“I don’t hate you,” Rozanov says.

“Then what is this?”

Rozanov stares at him for a long time. Glances down at Shane’s lips, forming the words, then back up to his eyes, long enough that Shane feels the flush of it, of being scrutinized by those fucking orange-washed eyes, burning down his chest and along his neck, across his face. He sees Rozanov see it, sees him flicker his gaze to Shane’s cheeks, and Rozanov’s lips twitch. Finally, he looks away, back to the ocean.

“Not here.”

And Shane will do anything, anything right now, to keep Rozanov talking to him. It’s the easiest thing in the world to say, “Do you want to talk in my hotel room?”

“You are inviting me to your hotel room,” Rozanov repeats.

“Yes?”

“I did not ask you to. I did not tell you I want this. You are asking me.”

Shane starts to wilt under the weight of something in Rozanov’s words he doesn’t understand. “If you don’t want to…”

“No,” Rozanov says quickly. “I just want record to show. You asked me.”

Shane sighs. Wonders if Rozanov is always like this, talking in weird riddles. It certainly feels like all their interactions have gone that way lately. “Fine. Whatever. Yes. I’m asking you.”

Rozanov rises to his feet in a fluid, easy motion. “Text me your room number. You have my phone,” he says, and he’s gone, disappearing down the beach, back toward the hotel.

Shane lets the sky get truly dark, a deep purple that washes out all of the glittering detail of the waves, and thinks about Rozanov never texting him back, this whole time, reading everything.

He feels like he’s had a stiff drink, threw it back too fast, buzzy and staticky all over, and warm beneath his ribs. He has to get back to his hotel room.

He sends Rozanov his room number while he’s riding the elevator up to the eleventh floor. He opens his door, lets himself inside. Stands in the middle of the room with his phone in his hand for ten minutes, not sure what he’s waiting for.

His phone rings, and he stares and stares at Rose Landry on the screen, the phone making his palm hot beneath it, until the call cuts, and then he’s left with his black screen and his heart beating out of his chest, and he throws the phone on his bed and heads to the shower.

There is no need to shower just to talk. Just to find out the fucking why of everything. There is no need to bend at the waist and stick soapy fingers inside of himself and make sure he is clean everywhere and he smells nice and his teeth are brushed just to talk.

He puts new clothes on, and he sits on his bed, and stares at the long list of text messages he’s sent to Rozanov that Rozanov has never replied to, until there’s a knock on his door and he swallows down the hot rising nerves and frightened anticipation and forces his face into some kind of neutral expression and goes to the door, and puts his hand out and opens it.

And Rozanov is through it even before Shane has it fully opened, pushing his huge body through the doorway, and then he is standing between the door and Shane, and Shane is fixed in place. Stuck. And Rozanov is closing all of the rest of the space that exists in that tight little corner of the entryway, and backing Shane up against the wall, and Rozanov is over him. Shane can’t see anything beyond Rozanov’s arms and chest and neck and face and then Rozanov is bringing his pretty mouth down on Shane’s and that’s it, that’s all Shane knows anymore, all he sees.

He opens his mouth for Rozanov and Rozanov slips his hot tongue inside and licks between his lips and Shane moans for it, finds his own hands in Rozanov’s soft curls and sinks in and sucks on Rozanov’s tongue, licks back into him, pulls him closer, like there is anywhere for him to go, except maybe inside Shane. Yes, that’s where he’d like him to go. All the way inside.

Shane feels like he might have a heart attack. He is so excited, so nervous and wanting and freaked out and electrified, that he’s sure it’s going to throw him into cardiac arrest. Rozanov presses against him so close, and Shane can feel he’s hard, maybe a second before Rozanov rolls into him, fits in against him so their cocks brush together through their clothes, and Shane’s head goes back so hard against the wall that it makes the stupid pictures hanging by the TV shake.

Shane laughs shakily into Rozanov’s mouth, and Rozanov brings a hand up, slides it between Shane and the wall, so his head is cradled. For some reason, that is what does it, makes Shane push and grab and steer Rozanov toward the bed, collapse them both down onto it, and as soon as he does, Rozanov has them twisted around, flipped, Shane on his back on the mattress and Rozanov huge and heavy and hot above him.

Shane wonders absently if he should be shocked that this is happening. If that is what the tension in his chest, his wildly beating heart, his stinging eyes should mean. But he isn’t, is he? He prepped in the shower for this, like he knew it would happen. Maybe he did know. Maybe he’s known all along. Maybe this is exactly what he’s wanted. He thinks, maybe he wouldn’t even care if Rozanov did hate him, as long as he could do exactly this.

Rozanov breaks away from his mouth only to tear Shane’s clothes off his body, then his own, and every time he comes back his mouth is hotter and his kiss is more demanding, licking all along the inside of Shane’s mouth, sucking Shane’s tongue between his teeth and biting down, Shane’s lips bruised and throbbing. His cock slots itself against Shane’s, and it feels too fucking good. Shane aches to see it, their dicks burning hard and weeping against each other, Rozanov’s precome dribbling onto him and making a little puddle on Shane’s stomach with his own. But Rozanov’s hand is on his jaw too tight for him to move, forcing him up, where Rozanov can take whatever he wants from Shane’s mouth.

Rozanov touches him like he knows exactly what Shane wants, and Shane doesn’t even know what he wants, he discovers it as Rozanov goes: his mouth dragging over Shane’s Adam’s apple, down to the curve of his collarbone: Yes, please. His big hand palming Shane’s chest, squeezing down hard to roll Shane’s nipple meanly between two fingers: Fuck, oh god, more. Shane gasps and his legs fall open, his hands gripping big fistfuls of Rozanov’s hair.

God, he will let him do anything, anything he wants at all. Rozanov is so confident, touching Shane, so sure of what he’s doing. It’s like he fucking knows Shane’s body, knows all of this will drive him fucking crazy.

Rozanov lets his mouth mark a wet trail down Shane’s body, licking down the line of his abs, the dip of his bellybutton, tracing damp whirls into the dark scratch of Shane’s pubic hair. He noses along the ridge of Shane’s cock head, rolls his mouth over it, teeth scratching cruelly against the straining skin, and Shane almost cries with wanting, with the need to have his cock swallowed by Rozanov’s teasing, smirking mouth.

“Please, Rozanov, fuck, please…” he mumbles, pressing his hands hard against his eyes, until he sees spots bloom in the dark.

He feels hot breath and sweat and spit pooling beneath his cock, and then Rozanov’s mouth is on him, taking him in, all the way to the seat of him, Rozanov’s nose against his pelvic bone and his leaking tip brushing the back of Rozanov’s throat.

Shane moans through a shaky breath in, out, knows he’s gonna fucking come the instant Rozanov starts to move his mouth on him, knows it’s been the inevitable outcome from the moment he found Rozanov at the beach, from the moment he got Rozanov’s phone number, from the very first time he dreamt about this happening. He almost wants to tell Rozanov, tell him about the dreams, tell him there hasn’t been a single waking moment, probably as far back as he can remember, that he hasn’t been thinking about this. That he doesn’t know how this hasn’t happened before, in all the time they’ve been playing against each other, because it feels like destiny, it feels like fate. It feels like Shane must have been trying, all this time, to stay away, or Rozanov has, because as soon as they were near each other, this was going to happen.

“Fuck, Rozanov, I’m gonna come, I can’t… I can’t…”

And Rozanov pushes Shane’s hips back against the mattress, hard, holds him in place, and pumps him with his mouth, all slick and hot and tight, and Shane is crying out in a voice he doesn’t even recognize and coming helplessly down Rozanov’s throat, his hands fisted in the bedsheets, his eyes pricking with tears.

Rozanov slides over him, covers him everywhere, hands pulling Shane’s away from his face, and he opens his eyes and Rozanov is there, his expression so fierce it’s almost frightening, and Shane stares and stares at him, gone from himself. He is already nodding his head before Rozanov speaks, knows what he wants, knows he’s going to give it to him.

“On your stomach.”

And Shane goes, rolling his head back into Rozanov’s neck when he bends down to kiss at the line of Shane’s shoulder, turning his face into the sweaty curls that are sticking to Rozanov’s temple. Rozanov’s hands put Shane where he wants him, spread his thighs apart, and Shane slides his eyes closed and drops his head down into the cradle of his elbows, splayed on the bed in front of him. He feels Rozanov lean back, taking heavy breaths in and out, and then Shane feels those big hands spreading him open, feels the catch of slippery latex at his hole, the pressure of Rozanov’s thick, hard cock beneath it.

Shane is going to die, if Rozanov doesn’t fuck him. If he stays like this, his cock tapping against Shane’s asshole and teasing him and not driving into him. Shane is going to beg, needy and pathetic, and he barely even cares how it will sound, how it will make him look. He needs it too badly, has been wanting this for too long. The words are already poised to fall out of his lips, repeating and repeating in his brain.

Please, please, please.

The pause is excruciating enough that Shane pulls up, peers back behind him. Rozanov has one hand on Shane’s ass, spreading him open, and the other wrapped around his cock. And he’s just looking at Shane, eyes big and pooling and mouth pressed flat, and Shane wishes, again, that he knew for once what that look meant.

Surveying him, Rozanov mutters, “You are so fucking…”

Please. Please, please, please.

“Rozanov…”

“Say it,” Rozanov says suddenly, and his eyes are on Shane’s, fixing him in place. Shane can’t look away, though he kind of wants to wilt under them. “Say you want this. Tell me.”

“I want it,” Shane whispers. He can’t find the breath to do anything else, shout or scream or cry.

“Want what.”

“I want you to fuck me, Rozanov. Please fuck me. Please–”

And Rozanov pushes his dick into Shane, into the space Shane has made for him there, or maybe finding what was already there, waiting for him. Buries himself all the way inside, Shane so full with him that it feels like he’s been rearranged around Rozanov’s cock, permanently altered. His chest is so tight that he’s sure it would crack if he took a full breath, if he did anything except drop his head down onto his arms and take reedy, shaking inhales of air and let the burn of it fill him, the satisfaction as his body takes and takes and lets Rozanov shape him into something perfect for him to fuck into, something made just for his big, thick dick. That’s all Shane wants, all he ever wants ever again.

Rozanov spreads out across him, mouth hot at his neck.

“So fucking pushy,” Rozanov says, and it sounds strangely wounded, low and soft, even as Rozanov pulls out and spreads him open on the fat head of his cock and fucks back in. “So persistent. Don’t even know what you’re fucking doing. You don’t know what you’re doing to me.”

“I… I…”

“I don’t know what I am doing either, Shane. I think maybe I can’t help it. I think maybe you’ve ruined me.”

“Rozanov…”

Rozanov curls a hand into the hair at the back of Shane’s head and pushes him down into the mattress. “Enough.”

It’s like permission that he’s giving Shane. Not to think, or talk, or even breathe. Not to bother with any of that. Just go open and empty and let Rozanov fill him with his cock, worry only about taking him, only about being good for Rozanov’s pleasure, only about making him feel good. Only that. Keep his ass in the air for Rozanov to fuck into, go tight and hot and greedy.

Shane gets hard again, nearly an afterthought until Rozanov finds his dick and wraps sweat-slick fingers around it, pumps him mercilessly, and Shane tightens up in his fist in no time at all and shouts and comes, spilling over Rozanov’s hand, dripping a mess on the sheets.

“Fuck, fuck, Shane,” Rozanov moans, through clenched teeth, and he comes with his cock stuffed all the way inside of Shane, curled over top of him, a weight that Shane wishes he could just stay beneath forever.

Shane feels all of it and none of it. The heat of Rozanov’s skin at his back, the tension of the stiff mattress beneath them, the scratchy bedding pressing against his face. The humid cloud of his own ragged breath around him, the sweat and tears stinging his eyes. It all settles like a veil over him. His nerves are like downed telephone wires, sparking at every point of contact, but his mind is underwater, overwhelmed, maybe for the first time in his life. Not thinking about the why of all of it, the consequences, what it means. Just sinking, sinking.

The Shane that Rozanov laid down on this bed is not the same Shane lying here, now. Everything is different. It has to be. He knew it from the moment Rozanov kissed him at the door, probably, and he knew how this was going to go, like some fundamental truth of him was being revealed. Rozanov has taken him apart, leaving only the things he’s been too afraid to confront about himself. Something too big has happened here. He knows what it feels like now to truly get what he wants.

He wants this. Again and again and again.

“Rozanov.”

Rozanov grunts, and pulls out of Shane, bracing himself with a broad hand between Shane’s shoulder blades. The bed groans as Rozanov steps off of it. Shane props himself up on his elbows to see Rozanov is already working himself back into his clothes.

Shane leans up, though he’d be happy to stay prone and stretched out and thrumming. “Do you–”

“Get some sleep, Hollander.” That shuttered expression is back, Rozanov’s eyes dark beneath pitched brows. “I won’t tell anyone about this.”

“I wasn’t worried about that,” Shane says, truthfully, because for some fucking reason he hadn’t considered it. It earns him an incredulous look, too, from Rozanov. “I’m not, um, not kicking you out, or anything. You can stay, if you want.”

But Rozanov has already shrugged back into his shirt and slipped his feet into his sneakers and feels far away, and Shane feels strangely humiliated for asking. For being naked and open and for wanting him to stay in the first place. For still not understanding. For wanting Rozanov to kiss him again. For almost wanting to beg for it, for him, still: please, please.

Rozanov shakes his head.

“No, I can’t.”

And he’s gone. The door clicks shut before Shane even fully realizes that he’s alone in his room again.

He drops his head back onto the bedspread, until he feels like he can stand. The evidence on him is obscene, cum and sweat and marks where Rozanov’s teeth left red imprints. Shane runs his fingers over them in the shower he has to take, his legs shaky and numb. He can’t even look at his phone, when he’s back in bed, the sheets drawn up around him, his body still thrumming and sore and buzzing. If he does, he knows what he will see.

Missed Call from Rose Landry. And nothing from Lily. And it’s all upside-down, isn’t it? It should be the opposite. It shouldn’t make him feel terrible, and ignored, and bereft.

He’s gotten what he wanted. And he has nothing that he wants, at the same time.

Shane goes directly to Rose’s apartment from the airport, because the churning in his stomach won’t let him do anything else. She smiles at him from the door when it opens, and she really is prettier without makeup, Shane thinks, and he feels like a fucking asshole.

“Hi, babe,” she says, and Shane can’t even kiss her, doesn’t deserve to. So he barrels right by her into the living room and stares at his shoes while he waits for her to meet him there, right in the middle of this awful thing he has to do to her, has already done.

“Babe, what’s wrong?” she says, because it’s hard to miss. She smartly gives him a little space, hangs back by the couch, and waits.

Shane looks at the wall behind her head and says, “I slept with someone else.”

It doesn’t really cover it all, but is probably the part that really matters, the part that is terrible for her, terrible for him to have done.

“Oh,” she says, and sits down, hands in her lap.

“I am really sorry, Rose. You’re really great. And I like you, a lot. You didn’t deserve that,” Shane stammers out, and wishes it didn’t just sound like the sort of bullshit that you say to someone when you have done something unforgivable, because it’s true. Rose is really great, and Shane really likes her. And she doesn’t deserve it. She is beautiful and funny and sweet, and Shane has really, really tried to make that enough. And if Ilya Rozanov had never existed, maybe it could have been, because Shane wouldn’t have known any better.

But Rozanov does exist, and so he has made it all impossible, in the span of one hour, one night, one hotel room. He walked through Shane’s door and made the truth too bright, too searing and obvious to ignore.

“I should have figured it out sooner,” he says.

“Figured out what?”

“I’m gay.”

Rose blinks at him. “Um, okay. Wow.”

Shane lets out a breath that he didn’t realize he’d been holding at the top of his lungs, like he was preparing for a high dive into a pool. He exhales, and inhales, and after that, he finds he doesn’t know what else to say besides what he’s already said. So he says it, again.

“I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

Rose bites down on her pretty lip, draws her eyebrows together. She laughs, nervously, and says, “Well, fuck.”

“...Yeah, fuck,” Shane says, and then he has to sit down, has to collapse onto the couch, and drop his head into his hands.

After a minute, Rose says, “...So it was a guy.”

“It was a guy,” Shane mumbles into his clammy palms.

“Was it another player?”

“Uh, no comment.”

Shane is aware that answer is as damning as any other.

They sit beside each other for a while, Shane feeling the heat of his own face against his hands, Rose probably wanting him to get the fuck out of her apartment, but too nice to say it. He doesn’t know, because he can’t seem to move to face her, can’t seem to do much but stay where he is, hunched over and cradled to himself.

Rose sighs.

“So, uh, this isn’t, like, a huge surprise.”

That is, apparently, what it takes to shock him back upright.

“It’s not?” he says, and peels his hands away from his face to look at her.

Rose is worrying at her lip, and looking at him like she feels a little sorry for him, which is insane, given the circumstances.

“Shane,” she says, and it sounds like the way his mom says, Oh, honey, when he’s missed some vitally obvious or important cue in a conversation. “No, it’s not. I mean, it is kind of shitty of you to sleep with someone else–”

“– Sorry,” Shane says again, automatically.

“– But I kind of had my suspicions already.”

Rose scoots closer to him on the couch, puts her hand on his knee, lets her thin fingers, her perfectly manicured nails rest there.

“You are very sweet and so fun to hang out with, Shane. But, um, I can tell, you know? When someone wants to fuck me, and when they, um, don’t.”

She gives his knee a little comforting pat, like his mom might, too. There, there.

“Fuck,” Shane says.

Rose laughs a little. Shane has always really liked her laugh. It’s so open and unguarded. She’s not at all like he would have imagined a Hollywood star to be. He’s always thought so. Even now, she is being so nice to him.

She says, “I was going to talk to you when you got back, so thanks for taking initiative, I guess?”

Shane laughs weakly. He feels a little queasy, sitting here on Rose’s couch and being very sweetly told that she’s known all along exactly what he is. When even he didn’t know. He must be so fucking obvious. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing you have to be naked with someone to see clearly. Maybe she could see it, Rozanov could see it, because they were able to get so close, too close for Shane to be able to hide anything. Closer, apparently, than he’s even allowed himself to be to what he truly wants. Maybe it’s easier to see on the outside.

“It was another player, yeah,” he says finally.

Rose nods sagely at this information. Then, she says, “Was it Ilya Rozanov?”

Shane turns to her with so much shock that she laughs, her smile going wide.

“How did you know that?”

She shrugs. “Lucky guess? You don’t talk about anyone to me except Hayden and Ilya Rozanov. You always seemed really preoccupied with him.”

“I thought he hated me.”

“Well, clearly that’s not the case.”

“I don’t fucking know anymore,” Shane starts, then realizes what he’s doing. Sitting on his ex-girlfriend’s couch, who he just cheated on, and complaining about the guy he did it with. Like she owes him any sympathy at all. He almost can’t believe she hasn’t kicked him out yet. “Um, thanks for being so cool about this, even though I don’t deserve it.”

And now Rose slaps him on the knee, lightly, like he’s somehow overthinking this very bizarre conversation. Like it is very normal, in fact, to dish about your gay life troubles with the girl who you were trying desperately not to be gay with.

“Oh please,” Rose says. “This isn’t even the worst story I have of a boyfriend cheating on me with another guy.”

“Really?”

“Really. One time it was a threesome in my apartment. All guys.”

“Holy shit,” Shane says, laughing. Rose is laughing too, so he figures it’s okay.

“You didn’t have a threesome with Hayden Pike and Ilya Rozanov, did you?”

“Fuck no.”

“Okay, so there you go. Not the worst.”

“Can we be friends?” Shane blurts out. He is realizing, laughing so easily with her on her couch, how much he’s going to miss her. How maybe no one knows him as well as she does. That maybe this is what he’s liked about being with her the most, wanted the most. Just someone he can feel comfortable with.

Rose cocks her head, like she’s studying him.

“Only if you really mean it, and not in the ‘let’s be friends’ way.”

“I really mean it. I really like you, Rose.”

“I like you too, Shane,” she says, and reaches for his hand, curls her small one around it. Then, she gives him an exaggerated wink, and adds, “Buddy.”

Shane feels the churning in his gut finally subside, for the first time since he boarded the plane from Tampa. He laughs with the relief of it.

The rest of his life might be a fucking mess. He might have feelings for a guy who hates him, for reasons he doesn’t understand, might be in love with a near stranger who he has been orbiting for almost ten years after a single unforgettable night together. Might have to grapple with the fact that he is not, in fact, destined for the blonde wife and gaggle of kids like the rest of his teammates. That he is different in so many ways, too many ways, maybe, for this sport to abide.

But at least he has this. Rose wants to be his friend. He hasn’t messed everything up.

Rose draws her feet up on the couch, leans into Shane’s shoulder, all the tension out of her now. And out of him, too, he realizes. He’s comfortable again.

She pulls her phone out, types Rozanov’s name into Google, pulls up some photos of him. She whistles at her screen like a cartoon character.

“Rozanov is really hot, by the way,” she says. “At least you picked a fucking hottie to cheat on me with.”

“Oh my god.”

She pushes her phone toward him, pointing at the picture she’s pulled up. Rozanov’s sweat-soaked chest and broad shoulders fill the screen, and even with just that much, Shane feels his mouth pool.

“He looks like he has a big dick,” Rose says appreciatively.

“I’m leaving,” Shane says, and she puts her hand on his arm and looks at him expectantly. “... Yeah, it’s big.”

Rose grins. “Knew it.”

By the time he is back in his car, heading home to his own apartment, Shane is sure that they will be fine. It is, probably, the only thing in his life that he feels sure about.

Shane texts Rozanov again, after All Stars. Now that he knows he reads the texts, even though he doesn’t respond. Now that he knows what it feels like, to have had Rozanov inside of him. It feels almost compulsory, shooting out these messages into the void. Every thought in his head, about Boston’s playing or otherwise, anytime he sits down to watch a division game, but especially any of Rozanov’s. Their message history starts to look really pathetic, a long line of blue bubbles without a single grey one in return, but Shane keeps at it.

So he isn’t very surprised when the Metros fly to Boston, and he texts his room number to Rozanov, 1343, and he doesn’t get a reply. He had been hoping, maybe, that the implication– Shane waiting for him there for sex, for a repeat of All Stars, fuck, just for a repeat of the way Rozanov kissed him in the doorway and held Shane’s face in his big hands– might get him at least something back, but nothing.

They play the game against each other, and Boston wins, and Shane doesn’t want to blame himself, but he does, because he always does. And because he can’t stop thinking about Rozanov, the entire time. Every face-off, he can’t stop staring at his face, at those ice-blue eyes that won’t even look back at him, at that grimacing mouth that has done crazy fucking things to him. Fuck, his dick has been in that mouth! How is he supposed to just play a hockey game like this? And Rozanov maybe slams him into the boards harder than usual, a big difference from the last time, when he avoided Shane like the plague, or maybe it’s the same as always, and it’s Shane that feels totally different, feels like he’s going to come undone every time he finds himself wedged between the hard creaking boards and Rozanov’s huge body and some part of him slips into that hotel room in Tampa again, can feel the heat of Rozanov’s naked chest against his back, the sweat and the humid breath, the stretch of his body around Rozanov’s thick cock.

Fuck, it’s pathetic, and Shane does think it contributes to the loss, because how could it not? He’s thinking of anything else except hockey. Maybe he’s spent his whole career avoiding Rozanov because, subconsciously, he thought this might happen to him.

It feels horrible, and wonderful, and scary, and overwhelming, and Shane hopes so, so badly that Rozanov will knock on his hotel room door at some point before Shane hops on a plane back to Montreal, and will show him again what he’s been missing out on all this time. He lays on his bed and stares at his unanswered texts and his heart beats insanely hard against his ribs, just at the possibility of it.

But Rozanov does not come. He does not answer Shane’s message. Shane gets back on the plane home, headphones on so no one will talk to him, and thinks in circles about whether All Stars will be the last time. If that was some kind of once-in-a-lifetime fluke. If Rozanov had swallowed his dislike of Shane down just long enough to fuck him into a new plane of existence, shake his whole fucking life up, and then slipped right back into hating him, like it was so easy. Maybe it is, when you’re Ilya Rozanov, and not Shane Hollander, and you are not, apparently, cursed to feel like this now that you know what the other tastes like.

In the locker room later that night, JJ says, “Hey, I heard Rozanov did not get on the plane with the rest of his team.”

He says it to Andropov, not even to Shane, and Shane probably isn’t even supposed to hear it. Andropov barely even listens, scrolling on his phone when JJ says it offhandedly, but Shane beelines over to them both and asks, “Why not?”

“I do not know,” JJ says. “I just heard, is all.”

“Did you hear about this?” Shane says to Hayden, who is getting dressed.

“No.”

“Do you think he’s sick?” Shane says. “He seemed fine at the game.”

“Don’t know, don’t care.” Hayden shrugs. “You have his number, right? Call him if you’re worried about it.”

So Shane does, as soon as he gets back home. Ilya Rozanov’s mailbox is full, and his recorded message helpfully informs Shane that I will never listen to your voicemail.

So Shane texts him. He would have to be pretty fucking sick not to travel with his team. He’s the captain, after all, and they’re not fucking pussies; they play sick all the time. It’s something maybe really serious. Maybe really bad. Maybe the reason why none of Shane’s messages have been replied to.

Hey, are you okay?

I heard you didn’t travel with your team. I hope you’re okay.

I know you hate me– he starts, then remembers Rozanov on the beach in Tampa, looking wrecked with some emotion Shane didn’t understand, saying that actually, he didn’t hate Shane.

So he deletes it. He writes instead, I know you probably don’t want to hear from me, which is probably pretty accurate. And adds, If I’m being really annoying, you can tell me to stop.

He takes a shower, just to do something else that isn’t staring at his phone, waiting for a text message he thinks is unlikely to come. He turns on the TV. This late at night it’s all just evening news, which he normally never cares to watch, but thinks might be a bit of a distraction, something to think about other than what happened to Rozanov, whether he’s doing all right. Whether he’s hurt or in the hospital or something even worse. Whether he wanted to respond to Shane’s texts, wanted to come to his hotel room, but couldn’t.

“The CEO of Lacuna is responding to claims made in a recent class-action lawsuit that their procedure did not adequately–”

He turns it off. Heads to bed, tries to sleep. At twelve forty-five, he gives up on that, too, and opens the book he’s picking his way through. He turns the bedside light on in a real commitment to fucking up his sleep schedule.

Just after one AM, his phone rings. Shane stares at it just long enough to read Lily, and swallow the bloom of nerves that creeps up his throat, and puts it to his ear.

“Hello?”

There is a long, excruciating silence. Long enough that Shane thinks, maybe, he missed something, or Rozanov is waiting for him to speak, so he tries again.

“Rozanov? Is everything okay?”

“...You shouldn’t do this,” Rozanov says, finally. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”

“I thought, after All Stars…” Shane says.

He doesn’t know what he thought. He doesn’t know why he thought spreading his legs for Rozanov in that hotel room would change anything. Somehow, this is starting to feel like a humiliation ritual, like he’s been a real fucking idiot about all of this. A needy, pathetic idiot.

He feels hot tears stinging at the corners of his eyes, and continues, because he apparently really has to rub it in for himself.

“You said you didn’t hate me. I thought it would be okay, if we talked.”

Rozanov makes a choked, incredulous noise on the phone. “You asked me not to,” he says. His voice sounds thicker than normal, and lower, and unsteadier. “You asked me, Shane. And now you want…” he cuts himself off with a sigh. “No.”

Shane feels fucking crazy. He hisses into the phone, afraid that Rozanov can hear that he’s on the verge of crying over emotions he doesn’t even understand. Over something that feels poised to spill out of him against his will.

“What the fuck are you talking about? I have barely even spoken to you before. I just was fucking worried about you. Fuck. I’m sorry.”

Rozanov is quiet for a while.

“Thank you for worrying about me,” Rozanov says finally. “Please do not contact me again.”

And then the line cuts, and Shane wants to throw his phone against the wall and watch it smash into a million pieces. He settles for throwing it to the corner of his bed and putting his head in his hands, pressing his palms hard against the mortifying wetness clouding his eyes.

It all feels like a big joke at his expense. Rozanov doesn’t hate him, but he wants Shane to leave him alone, and he makes it sound like it’s Shane’s idea, somehow. And it’s like, like he expects Shane to understand this. For this all, somehow, to make sense.

But it doesn’t make sense, any of it. Not the way Rozanov treats him, reading his messages, ignoring him otherwise, coming to his room at All Stars and fucking the hell out of him, checking him so hard into the boards that Shane’s teeth rattle, when he’s not avoiding contact on the ice like the plague. Not the way Shane feels about it all, texting the void of Rozanov’s phone number even though Rozanov has now made it plainly obvious that it isn’t welcome. Thinking about him all of the fucking time. Wanting to know if he’s okay. Wanting to know why he isn’t okay. Wanting to be the person that Rozanov calls, when he isn’t okay, even though he is a stranger, and Shane is a stranger to him, and other than that one night, they don’t know anything about each other.

What is wrong with Rozanov? What is wrong with him?

The Raiders put out a statement that Ilya Rozanov has taken some time off to be with his family after the unexpected passing of his father, and Shane thinks about Rozanov calling him at eight in the morning from Moscow to ask Shane to leave him alone. Rozanov is back from Russia a week later, playing again like nothing has happened, and he is there for the Boston versus Montreal game at home a week after that.

Shane has never felt like this, skating up to a face-off. Like he might puke on the dot. He wonders if that’s ever happened, and what Rozanov would do. Would he be worried about Shane, too? Or just disgusted by him?

“I’m sorry about your dad,” he mumbles, crouched over, staring at the gleaming white top of Rozanov’s helmet.

Rozanov nods, and still won’t look at him. “Okay.”

Shane wants to scream at him.

Why? Why can’t we talk? Why can’t I see you again, like All Stars? Why do you make it out to be my fault? Something I wanted? I don’t want this, at all. I want you. I want to kiss you again. I want to feel your hands in my hair and your cock in my mouth. I want you. I want you. I want–

The ref drops the puck, and Shane swipes it, but he isn’t thinking about the goal or where Hayden is on his left or Comeau on his right. He isn’t thinking about Boston’s D-men or whether Rozanov is fast enough on his heels to steal possession back. His mind is anywhere but on the fucking game. And what did his coach always say, even back in Juniors, even back in Peewee? If you’re on the ice and your head’s not in the game, you’re dead.

And so, of course, Shane is dead.

He doesn’t see Cliff Marleau coming and so he doesn’t brace himself and so he lets two hundred and twenty pounds crash into his body at full speed with no attempt to protect himself from the impact. He feels Marleau’s shoulder barrel right into his collarbone, and he feels the crack of bone and the blooming pain, so sharp it sucks all the breath right out of him, and he knows as soon as his head slams against the ice that he’s going to be concussed, and that his collarbone is broken, and that he’s fucking dead, just like coach warned him.

Chaos erupts on the ice and in the stands, and it’s all noise and lights swirling in a nauseating cacophony, and Shane’s head hurts, his whole body hurts, and hands are on him, maybe a teammate, maybe the medical staff, he isn’t even really sure.

Behind the pounding of his head, like a bullet ricocheting around his skull, there is this feeling, suddenly overwhelming, suddenly the only thing that Shane cares about. Like he’s forgetting something very, very important. Like he needs to talk to Rozanov, he needs to, he needs to. Rozanov is going to care about this, he’s going to be worried. Shane doesn’t know why, but he knows.

“Rozanov,” he says, as loud as he can, through the shouting of whoever the fuck is grabbing at him, strapping him to boards. “Ilya!”

“Shane, please don’t move!” someone says, and it’s not Ilya, so Shane doesn’t care. Again, louder and more urgently: “Don’t move!”

“Ilya!”

“Is he fucking okay?” someone else says, and that someone has a deep, beautiful voice, and the words sound so different, through the lilt of careful Russian intonation. “Fucking tell me!”

I’m okay, he wants to say. Just keep talking to me. Don’t push me away anymore.

But he’s already gone, carted off the ice, taken somewhere else. The back of an ambulance, maybe. There’s a really obnoxious siren, and he wants to ask someone to turn it off, but he is too tired and confused to say anything. And then, he drifts off, and he doesn’t hear anything anymore.

The hospital sucks. It’s boring, and Shane isn’t allowed his phone, and he isn’t allowed the TV, so he has nothing to do. The interesting stuff, attaching him to a million monitors and sticking needles in his wrists and taping the tubes down so he doesn’t jostle them out, that all happens while he’s still fucked up, in too much pain to really pay attention. By the time the fentanyl drip is going and he isn’t in searing pain any time he moves his shoulder or arm the tiniest bit, it’s mostly over.

The door to his room opens constantly. A doctor, telling him he doesn’t need surgery, that they want to keep him one full day for monitoring, but that they did a bunch of scans and determined he just has a bad concussion and a fracture that will heal on its own if he follows directions. A nurse, who comes in and frowns at the monitors and puts different bags of clear liquid up on their little metal hangars and erases a name from the whiteboard and writes a new one over it. A different nurse, a little bit later, who does basically the same thing.

Shane’s parents drive to Montreal, first thing in the morning, and hover around in his room for a while until he tells them, as nicely as he can, to go get a very long lunch so he can feel miserable, alone, for a while. So he can think about Ilya, who wouldn’t look at him during the game, but who was yelling at medical to fucking tell me if he’s okay all the same.

Thinking about Ilya makes his head hurt more, but Shane doesn’t really want to think about anything else. He is definitely fucked for the playoffs, which means the Metros are probably out, so he lets the shame and the disappointment of that wash over him for a little while, and then it’s back to the other kind of shame, and disappointment, and wanting, always wanting.

And then the door opens, and it’s Ilya Rozanov. And Shane is briefly flooded with so much joy that he feels stupid with it, giddy. The feeling is tempered by the way Rozanov looks, scowling at him from the edge of the room, lined up against the door like he’s afraid Shane might leap from his hospital bed and attack him. Shane can’t read expressions at the best of times, and if he could read Rozanov, ever, his life would probably be a lot easier, and he doesn’t know what that expression is supposed to mean. Just, Rozanov is here, in Shane’s room, which is a minor miracle, but he doesn’t look happy at all about it.

“Hi,” Shane says, vaguely aware that he sounds kind of goofy, loopy from head trauma. Hiiii.

Rozanov takes a step forward toward the bed.

“You said this was too dangerous for you. Too much of a distraction.”

Another step, two, around the corner of the bed, approaching Shane, looking for all the world like he might hit him when he gets close enough.

“You asked me to leave you alone. And I said, okay. I said, I understand, Shane. You have to do what is best for you.”

At the side of the bed, looking down at Shane from his full height, Rozanov looks so big, so fierce. His pretty mouth is flat, pillowy lips pressed to a thin line, and his eyes are red and puffy and something like angry and something like sad. Some combination of emotions that Shane can’t piece together, can’t make sense of. Even if his brain wasn’t broken, he doesn’t think he could make sense of it; now, it just makes his head pulse and throb and scream at him.

“And now you won’t leave me alone. You will not give me one moment of peace. And it looks like you were right. It is fucking dangerous. It is a fucking distraction. It didn’t fucking work, Shane. Your stupid thing that you did to your head. It didn’t work. I did everything you asked me to do, and it didn’t work.”

“What?” Shane says. He is suddenly afraid that he might start crying. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t understand. I never… I never told you to leave me alone. I don’t want that. I don’t want that at all, Ilya.”

He tries to reach for Ilya’s hands, which have come to grip the rails on the side of the bed, going white with the tension. He thinks Ilya might pull away, flinch back like he’s been burned, but he slips his palm over Ilya’s clenched knuckles and Ilya lets him, doesn’t move his hand or even look sideways at the tubes dangling stupidly from Shane’s wrist.

“I feel like I did something? Something really bad to you. I don’t remember what it is. I don’t know why I don’t remember.” Shane really wishes he didn’t sound so drunk and stupid, because he’s trying to say something serious. “I wish I did. I wish you liked me, because I like you a lot, Ilya. I really, really like you.”

Ilya’s eyes slide closed, and his head dips. For a minute, they are both caught there, Shane’s hand over Ilya’s, his heart in his throat. Wishing that the room was darker and quieter, and that it was just them, behind a locked door. That they were back in that hotel room in Tampa instead, where Shane was probably equally as confused and Ilya looked equally as miserable, but at least they were kissing. At least there was that.

Ilya opens his eyes and fixes them on Shane. His eyes are so red. Shane sees it now, because Ilya is really close, and Shane is really looking. The blue makes the red stand out so much more. It’s hard to hide it. Ilya doesn’t look like he is really even trying to.

“Do you want to know?” Ilya says. “Do you want me to show you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

And then the door opens, and a nurse Shane hasn’t seen before steps in, and now Ilya really does jerk away from Shane’s touch like he’s been burned, takes two big strides away from the bed to some safe distance away.

And because this is fucking Montreal, his nurse knows who he is, and knows who Rozanov is, and decides to be fucking funny about it. “Uh oh, I hope no one is trying to kill each other in here. Your team got close enough to that last night, Mr. Rozanov.”

Ilya looks stricken, like he’s been caught doing something wrong. He looks to Shane, like Shane might be worried about the fucking nurse. He looks like he might leave, just when it felt like he might actually tell Shane something. Tell him what he’s wanted to know for months.

“Um, I’m sorry, but can you give us, like, ten minutes alone?” Shane says, straining to get the words out clearly, knows he’s managed to do so because Ilya whips around and stares at him. “We just need a minute, please.”

“Oh, um. Okay,” the nurse says, looking between them, like she doesn’t like whatever it is they’re up to. But she’s gone a moment later, the door mercifully shut behind her, and they are alone again.

“What did you want to show me?” Shane says.

Ilya looks at him for a long time, before he finally pulls out his phone. He thumbs around on it for a minute before he hands it to Shane. Shane doesn’t even mention that he isn’t supposed to look at screens, which Ilya almost certainly knows, too. He thinks, right now, he’d take a permanently broken brain over all the weirdness of the last few months.

So he reaches for Ilya’s phone and he squints at the screen, his head protesting immediately against the brightness, but he pushes through.

“You asked me to delete everything,” Ilya is saying, watching him from the side of the bed. “But.”

It’s their text messages. Shane can immediately tell, recognizes the pathetic stuff he sent when Ilya’s father died and he was trying to get Ilya to talk to him. The name at the top of the thread is Jane. Jane and Lily, fucking code names, for some fucking reason.

Shane scrolls back, through Are you okay? and room numbers, and I don’t hate you, and This is Shane Hollander, and there is more, before that. There is more. There is a link to Lacuna’s website that Shane sent to Ilya, months ago, and below it, I’m scheduled for the 23rd. Please don’t contact me after this. And delete everything I’ve sent to you. And Rozanov’s reply, just a thumb’s up.

And before that, Rozanov saying: are you sure? it has not been okay until now? it can all go back to how it was before. you do not have to do this.

And Shane: It’s like I said on the phone. I think this has become too much, for both of us. It’s better if the distraction is removed entirely.

And before that. you will be in Boston on the 8th? And Shane saying, my flight gets in at 9AM. And the reply: ah, so I will have you on your knees for me by 10:30.

Before that. Hotel rooms, pin drops. Shane’s address.

Your backcheck’s looking sloppy.

i must be spending too much time with world’s slowest center

Fuck you :)

And then before that. Before that. Years, and years, and years. Shane keeps scrolling, keeps scrolling, and there is still more. He stops somewhere in 2013, because he thinks it might go on forever, through his entire life, maybe, and because his head feels like it’s splitting open, and because he realizes he has started to cry, hot, mortifying tears that have dripped onto his hand where it’s still holding Ilya’s phone.

“What the fuck,” he says, his voice wobbly. He looks up at Ilya. “How… how long?”

Ilya looks… sad. He looks sad, fucking wrecked, even. That’s what that expression has been, this whole time, probably.

“Since before we had each other’s phone numbers,” he says hoarsely. “Since always.”

He reaches over the railing of the bed and pulls his phone gently out of Shane’s shaky hand.

“I will get the nurse,” Ilya says, and steps away from the bed.

“Wait,” Shane mumbles, but Ilya doesn’t turn around again, just slips through the door, and then he’s gone.

The first thing Shane remembers is Ilya Rozanov, looking at him in the showers, after the CCM commercial.

He’s pretty sure he’s done some permanent damage to his brain, staring at Ilya’s phone while his entire sense of reality fell to pieces, because everything hurts worse than it did even on the ice, when Marleau cracked his head open to begin with. He asks the nurse to turn the lights off and close the blinds, and then there is nothing to distract him from the bits and pieces of memories that have, apparently, been concussed back into his brain.

The showers, water pouring down the insane muscles of Ilya’s chest and abs and his perfect ass and his huge arms. The first time Shane saw his cock, red and hard and heavy in Ilya’s hand, the head gleaming where it peeked out of Ilya’s tight fist, and the way that Shane had wanted him. How it had taken all of his willpower to walk away, but not enough to leave the lockers. Because he had wanted him just a little more than how afraid he was of it.

Start with your most difficult memories, please. It helps if you talk through them out loud, but it’s not necessary for the procedure to be successful. See on the screen, where these waves are cresting really high? That’s how your brain processes the recall. When these waves even out, like this, we know the memory has been erased. By the time you are finished recalling the memory in your mind, it should be permanently removed.

He was laying down in his bed, in his house, and a woman he had never met before that day was sitting in a clinical-looking chair that she and her assistants had brought with her, and she was peering into a complicated set of monitors that all connected to the little diodes they had placed all over his head. They made a weird, uncomfortable humming sound, and they thrummed on his skin, and he had to fight the urge to pull them off. He remembers this now, and he remembers signing the forms, giving them permission to take all his memories of Ilya Rozanov out of his head, as well as the memories of the procedure ever being performed on him.

We find that when patients retain the memory of having the treatment, it can complicate its effectiveness.

By the time he is discharged from the hospital, he remembers the first time Ilya came to his house, how he had asked Shane if he was okay as he fucked him, how his eyes never left Shane’s, really wanting to make sure. Are you okay, pushing inside him the first time. Still okay? kissed against his shoulder blade, Ilya more gentle than Shane would have ever imagined. Kissing him and kissing him, and Shane never wanting to do anything other than this, forever.

His parents want him to recuperate at their cottage in Ontario, but Shane doesn’t think he can do this, walk through the ruins of his memories, with his mom and his dad hovering around him, so he promises them that he’s fine and stays home in his Montreal condo, where he can feel as bad as he wants to and can hate himself as much as he wants to.

He remembers Sochi, the punched-in-the-gut nausea of Ilya hissing at him that he didn’t give a fuck about him, in so many words. Vegas, and the way he’d folded, his anger collapsing into bare, unconcealed wanting. The relief of Ilya finally touching him again, his breath on Shane’s neck, forcing its way underneath the starchy collar of his tuxedo. The way he had thought, Yes, yes, please, oh god, please.

Years, and years, and years. They come back in pieces, out of order, and he wonders if this is the order in which he forgot them, paid someone a small fortune in order to be exorcised of them all.

He remembers Boston, remembers Ilya coming with Shane’s name on his lips. And he remembers, finally, the thing that made him do this terrible thing to them both: sitting on Ilya’s lap, the fucked-out afterglow humming warm and soft between them, and what Shane had wanted to say and had bitten back at the very last minute: Oh my god, I fucking love you.

And then, the terror, the stammered apology, and running away, like he could outrun what he had felt in that moment.

And the very next time he had turned on his TV and saw that lady on the beach with her happy, perfect life, he had called the number and scheduled the procedure.

He tries to go to the Lacuna website, now that he remembers, but it’s gone. He searches the internet for the name, and what comes up as the most recent news is all bad, which maybe he should have expected: the company’s recent bankruptcy filing, the CEO being called in for hearings, the class action lawsuit. People on Reddit saying their memories came back after falling and hitting their head, after car accidents, in some cases just going about their normal lives. One woman was in the middle of labor and remembered the baby she had lost two years before and had given her life savings to forget.

When he’s sure he’s remembered everything, he texts Ilya.

I remember. All of it, I think. I’m sorry.

He doesn’t expect a reply back, certainly doesn’t think he deserves one. But he gets one, anyway.

looks like Marley knocked some sense back into your head

maybe next hit will work on your backhand skills

Shane smiles in the darkness of his room, like he’s done for years, chewing absently on his hoodie strings and staring at Ilya’s texts.

You’re an asshole, he sends back.

The reply, this time, takes longer.

you are clearly the asshole, Shane Hollander

Which is fair, Shane thinks. He will probably be the bigger asshole between them until the end of time.

Boston goes to the playoffs, and Shane watches from his couch, and chirps Ilya in his texts, and secretly roots for them to go all the way. Ilya doesn’t always reply, and Shane doesn’t push him, but sometimes he does, sometimes it feels like it used to, the easy rhythm of their back and forth, the twinge between Shane’s ribs when he sees Lily on his screen.

Shane calls Ilya in the couple of days between the second and third rounds of the playoffs, after he watches Boston knock Toronto out of the bracket. To his surprise, Ilya picks up the phone.

“You are calling to congratulate me on my hat trick?” Ilya says.

“Congratulations. Your backcheck is still lazy, though.”

“Ah, okay. Makes sense, to take tips from captain of losing team.”

Shane laughs. “That’s your fault, asshole.”

“Ah, no. Is Marley’s fault. I would have beat you, fair and square.”

“Fair and square,” Shane repeats, in a poor imitation of Ilya’s accent. “Um. Listen. What are you going to do if you get knocked out of the playoffs?”

Ilya scoffs. “This will not happen.”

“Okay, but if you do. Are you going back to Russia?”

“No, there are still MLH awards. Usually I go after.”

Shane closes his eyes, steels himself for what he actually called to say. What he’s been thinking about saying for weeks now, even though he knows it’s probably impossible. Probably too late, the damage already done between them. Ilya even talking to him now, after everything, is practically a miracle.

Enough of a miracle that it makes Shane think, in a tiny, hopeful way, that it isn’t entirely too late. Enough for Shane to feel brave enough to ask for something really crazy.

“You could come to my house and watch the finals here,” he says. “Together, with me.”

Ilya is quick to say, “You are trying to jinx me? I will be in the finals, Hollander.”

“Okay, but if you’re not?”

“Hollander,” Ilya says, and now his voice is soft, and sad, like it was in the hospital, and the hotel in Tampa. And Shane is afraid that maybe he will hang up, like he left before, both of those times. And Shane has to say all of it, so that even if Ilya does, at least he’ll know.

“I don’t think you’re a distraction, Ilya. I don’t want to forget again. I don’t ever want to forget. I… I want to be with you. I don’t know how, but I want to.”

There is a long sigh on Ilya’s end of the phone, a string of Russian, which Shane thinks is pretty fucking unfair, because he’s at least saying the scariest things he’s ever admitted out loud in English, for both of their sakes.

“I’m in Montreal, at my apartment,” Shane continues. “I know you have the address. You can come, if you want. I want to see you. Good luck, either way.”

“Thank you, Shane,” Ilya says.

Shane lets him go without asking again, because it’s enough, that Ilya is talking to him like this, enough that he picks up the phone when Shane calls. It’s more than he thought he would get. He will have to live with the not-knowing for a while, the uncertainty. Will have to figure out how to sleep, with all the pillows propped up on his bed so his shoulder doesn’t ache and his collarbone sets correctly, and with his heart racing and his gut churning and just, well. Just hoping for the best.

The Admirals take out the Raiders in the third round of the playoffs. Ilya is hurt, protecting his ribs, crunching defensively in on himself when he’s checked into the boards. Carter Vaughn even looks like he feels bad about it. He skates back up to Rozanov when the puck is dead and pats him apologetically on his shoulder. Rozanov shrugs and nods his head, but of course it’s impossible to make out what they’re saying.

Shane watches from his couch, massaging absently where his collarbone still twinges. The doctors say he’s basically good to go, but he shouldn’t do any upper body exercises for another couple of weeks. He still wears his sling when it gets sore, or when he’s just sitting idly around.

He texts Ilya after the game.

Sorry about the loss. How are your ribs?

fucking killing me. I am more angry that oldest man in conference is going to final.

My mom says the Admirals will take it this year.

i thought you said your mom knows a lot about hockey, Ilya says.

Shane writes, Will you come to Montreal now that you’re free? Hovers his thumb over the button to send it. He changes his mind at the last second and deletes the whole thing. He’s already asked. Ilya can come, if he wants. If all he wants to do is text Shane dumb shit until the end of time, that’s okay, too. Shane will take what he can get.

The days pass. The Admirals win in New York, then lose in New York, then win in San Francisco, then lose in San Francisco. Then win again, and it looks like his mom is right, they could win it all. That very night, in New York.

And then the playoffs will be over, and Ilya will not have come to Montreal after all. Shane has told himself he won’t be disappointed if it doesn’t happen. That he won’t hold it against Ilya. If the shoe was on the other foot, if it was Ilya who had chosen to forget Shane’s whole existence and made him promise to keep the secret forever, he doesn’t know if he would be so willing to jump on a plane and see him, either.

He orders some Cokes to the house, just in case. Puts them in his fridge, so they will be cold, and tries not to think about what he’ll do with them, if Ilya doesn’t come after all and he’s left alone with them. Probably pour them sadly down his kitchen sink and feel sorry for himself.

He cleans his house, in a half-assed manner, because he’s still kind of injured, even though the cleaning lady came through earlier in the day and it’s not strictly necessary. Just in case. Everything is just in case, including the prep he does to his body in the shower, trying hard not to pull anything, imagining the mortifying conversation he’d have in the emergency room if he managed to reinjure himself sticking fingers up his own ass.

And then, when he can’t think of anything else to do to keep his mind off the fact that Ilya is definitely not coming to his house and he is going to be sitting here sad and alone, which he probably deserves but can still feel bad about, he turns on the pregame show and finds the most comfortable position he can manage on the couch, and turns his phone over and over in his hands and pretends to listen to the commentary on the television.

Twenty minutes before the game starts, there is a knock on his door. Shane knows it’s Ilya before he even answers it, before he’s swung the door open. His parents are at home, cooking dinner, and his mom is two glasses of white wine deep and sending him her tipsy predictions on the final. She thinks New York is going to win tonight, and Dad thinks he’s put a little too much paprika in the chicken Basquaise, and it’s definitely not them at the door. Hayden’s just had a baby, and is watching the final with a newborn on his chest and two twin girls bracketing him on either side, and so it isn’t him either. So it has to be Ilya, even though he hasn’t told Shane a thing, hasn’t texted or given any indication that he was planning to come. Shane leaps to his feet and goes to the door and swings it open.

And it’s Ilya Rozanov, of course. Of course it is. And he’s tall, and beautiful, crowding Shane’s doorway, and Shane is in love with him, and has been for a long, long time.

“Hi,” Shane says. “Um. Thanks for coming.”

Ilya nods, and steps inside.

“I, um, have some Cokes, if you want.”

“No, is okay.”

They stand in the doorway, looking at each other. Shane wants to kiss him, but doesn’t know if that’s okay. Like, maybe Ilya is here, but doesn’t want that from Shane anymore? It’s kind of a lot to go through, crossing the border, getting on a flight, but. But Shane isn’t sure.

“Um, do you…”

“Shane.”

Ilya takes a step closer, another, and Shane is crowded against the wall again, like in Tampa, and many, many times before that, and he’s so grateful and relieved that he sinks against it and slides down a little, pathetically. Ilya’s arms come up around him and give him something to collapse into, to go soft and pliant against. Ilya is so warm everywhere, warm breath in Shane’s hair, warm fingers on the back of his neck.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” Shane says. “I am so sorry, Ilya.”

Ilya presses a kiss somewhere along Shane’s temple. “Okay, okay.”

And then Ilya’s fingers tip Shane’s jaw upward, putting him where Ilya wants him, and his mouth finds Shane’s, and they are finally, finally kissing again. Ilya works Shane’s lips apart with his tongue, and he tastes so good, and he’s such a good kisser, always has been, always makes Shane go crazy just from this, just from his tongue in Shane’s mouth and his hand on Shane’s jaw, fingers pressing against the edge of his lips.

Shane runs hands up Ilya’s shirt and across his back and into his hair, and pulls him closer, as close as he can. Kisses him wildly, desperately, chases his tongue and licks across his teeth and sucks a bruise into Ilya’s lip. They break apart, breath ragged, and all he can see when he looks up are Ilya’s blue eyes, just blue, blue, blue.

“I am a fucking idiot, to do this, after everything,” Ilya whispers, holding Shane’s face in his hands. “I am very fucking stupid.”

“I love you,” Shane says.

Ilya laughs. “Jesus, Shane. Of course you say this now.”

He kisses Shane, again, and presses their foreheads together, slots his nose against the hollow of Shane’s upper lip, and Shane remembers marveling at this before, the way they fit together. Like they aren’t meant to go anywhere else, get any further apart from each other than this.

Ilya says, “I love you, too, so. We are both very fucking stupid.”

Shane smiles so wide he’s sure he looks crazy. He feels crazy. He feels happier than he’s ever felt in his life.

“Yeah, fine. We’re fucking stupid. I love you, Ilya.”

Ilya leans forward and braces his arms under Shane’s thighs and lifts him up, carries him over to the couch.

“You will be okay, here?” he says. His eyes drop to the sling that Shane forgot he’s wearing.

“Yeah, it’s fine. I can take it off, just–”

“Good. I did not come all this way to not fuck you.”

There is a roar on the TV, and Shane looks at it as Ilya is laying him down across the couch, just in time to see Scott Hunter win the first faceoff, shoot down the ice like a man possessed. It’s also the last thing he sees before Ilya picks the remote up off of the coffee table and turns the TV off.

“Wait, that's…”

“Shane.” Ilya crawls over him, closing his hand around Shane’s face and turning him away from the TV, making him look at Ilya instead. Ilya looks predatory, almost mean. Hungry and looming and staring so intently his eyes are practically glowing. “I do not give a fuck about this game. Fuck San Francisco. Fuck New York. I do not want you to look at anything except me, right now.”

And then Ilya stretches out against him, his hips slotting right up along Shane’s, and he bends down and puts his mouth to Shane’s neck and Shane doesn’t give a fuck about New York or San Francisco anymore, either.

Ilya minds Shane’s sling and the residual hurt along his shoulder and his neck, gentler than usual as he hikes Shane’s t-shirt up above his nipples and sucks on them and slides his big hands down around Shane’s back, between him and the slippery leather cushions. He drags Shane’s sweats and boxers to the floor and puts his hot mouth on Shane’s aching, dripping cock, keeps Shane lying on the couch with a big hand pressed to his chest, over his heart.

“Is this okay?” Ilya breathes along the burning skin of Shane’s thighs, as he takes whole handfuls of Shane’s muscle and pushes his legs toward his head, curling him upward.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Shane mumbles, even though he obviously never asked the doctor about whether it was advisable to get folded in half and eaten out during his recovery. “Just… please, Ilya…”

And Ilya drops his head down and slides his tongue over Shane’s asshole, like Shane is begging for. Shane spreads his legs as wide as he can afford to on the couch, desperate for Ilya’s clever tongue and his mean teeth and his soft lips. Ilya spits on the center of his puckered hole and spreads saliva greedily around the rim with his tongue, and then, apparently satisfied, licks right into the trembling center, opening him up, pushing his long tongue easily inside.

It’s the most Shane’s had of him in months, more than he thought he might ever have of him again, and it’s so good and it’s not enough. Shane can’t wait anymore, not when Ilya is here with him like this, not when Ilya said he loves Shane. He loves him.

“Ilya, I need you.”

Shane puts a hand in Ilya’s curls and tightens around them, pulls him up, so he can see Ilya’s pretty face, messy and proud of himself. Shane talks, breath so thin it’s almost nothing, which makes him sound like he’s begging and not demanding.

“I need your dick. Need to feel you inside of me. Can you?”

Ilya slides up the length of him, kisses him hungrily, wetting Shane’s chin, his lips, the pooling spit in Ilya’s mouth sliding easily down Shane’s throat when Ilya’s tongue pushes inside. Ilya rears back and watches Shane’s Adam’s apple bob up and down, his eyes lidded and his breath short.

“Get up,” Ilya says. “Lean over back of the couch. Will be better for you.”

Shane goes easily, willing to do whatever Ilya wants him to at this point. Anything, if it will get Ilya’s dick inside of him faster. He gets up on his knees, spreads himself heavily across the firm cushions of the couch, and Ilya is right, his shoulder feels better this way. It’s the last thing he cares about right now, but at least one of them is looking out for him.

Ilya’s hands are on his hips, ghosting over the base of his spine, sinking down to test the give of his hole, knuckles ghosting along the wet, trembling rim. Ilya sinks two fingers in, twists them, scissors them apart. He is half-kneeling, half-standing behind Shane, his thighs between the splay of Shane’s. Shane cranes his neck behind him to see: Ilya’s mouth open, his eyes fixed on where his fingers are disappearing into Shane’s body.

“Ilya…”

“Don’t worry, Shane,” Ilya says, breathlessly, smiling. “I will give you what you want.”

“I don’t want a condom,” Shane blurts out. “I want to feel all of you.”

There is a hissed breath, and then Ilya’s heavy body is wrapping around him from behind, warm lips pressing to his shoulder, his neck, the topmost knob of his spine.

“This is why I have become so stupid,” Ilya breathes. “You don’t know what you fucking do to me.”

“Show me,” Shane says. “Please. Show me.”

Ilya gives him what he wants. Slicks his dick up raw in his hand while Shane watches. Takes a moment just to line himself up against Shane’s hole, and then he pushes inside, his cock touching every part of Shane on the tight slide in.

Ilya moans, “Shane,” like he can’t help it, like it’s the best thing he’s ever felt.

It is the best fucking thing Shane has ever felt, too. “Fuck, I fucking love you,” he says, can’t help it, either.

And then, he can’t say anything, dissolves into moans and ragged inhales of breath as Ilya fucks him, so close and hot and thick inside him, just him, nothing between them at all. Even if he had never remembered the rest, every other time that it felt the best it had ever felt, every time he came apart shaking around Ilya’s cock, Shane would still have this. So good, so fucking deep and fast and almost too much, and not enough. Ilya could give him everything and it still wouldn’t be enough for him. Even when he forgot everything, he couldn’t stop asking for it. He couldn’t help himself.

Shane wants it to last forever and also thinks if he doesn’t get to come soon, he is going to die. Ilya’s hand wraps around his jaw, sinks fingers in Shane’s mouth, and his breath is warm along Shane’s ear, teeth against the shell of it, tongue snaking inside.

“All along, you couldn’t forget this, hm?” Ilya says. “Your body has always belonged to me. It would not let you forget so easily.”

And this is what makes Shane tighten up around Ilya and makes his legs buckle and makes him come, no hand on him at all, striping his own stomach and the brown leather with thick, cloudy spunk, and he thinks, that’s right, that’s exactly right. He has always, always belonged to Ilya.

“God, fuck, Shane,” Ilya says, pistoning his hips, and Shane feels briefly insane, might cry under the onslaught, oversensitive and shaky. “So good for me. Love of my life, fuck–” he sinks all the way inside Shane, and shudders, a moan bit back between his teeth, and Shane feels Ilya’s hot cum flood inside of him, pushed in deep by Ilya’s long cock.

Shane lets his head fall forward onto his sweaty arm, his eyes sliding closed. He feels warm and perfect everywhere, Ilya pressed against his back, still thick and hot inside of him, and if he doesn’t move, if he stays still like this, maybe Ilya will never pull out, maybe Shane can just remain here forever, fucked out in bliss.

But, of course, that isn’t possible. Eventually, Ilya does move, presses an apologetic kiss to Shane’s shoulder as he slides his softening cock out of Shane’s body.

“You are okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Shane says, even as the first trickle of cum between his thighs makes his nose wrinkle. Gross. The shower is so fucking far away, too. He reaches behind him, threads his fingers through Ilya’s, pulls his hand around to press it against his chest. “Mm, don’t go.”

“Where would I go?” Ilya says, squeezing Shane’s hand. “I came all the way to Montreal just for this.”

Shane feels a little twist in his ribs at that. “When do you have to fly back?”

Ilya noses into his neck. “Don’t worry about it.”

“What does that mean? When?”

“When you are sick of me.”

Shane twists around so he can look at Ilya’s face. Ilya is looking at him with a practiced, neutral expression, but his eyes are searching Shane’s, flickering between one and the other.

“You don’t have to go back?”

Ilya gives a small shrug, like this is no big deal at all. Like they have always had the luxury of time, and not a decade of stolen hours and minutes and never any more than that.

“Season is over. There is only MLH awards in June.”

“What about Russia?”

“Do you want me to go to Russia, Shane?” Ilya says.

“No,” Shane says very quickly. “No. I want you to stay here.”

“Okay. Then I will stay.”

They get up, after Shane has kissed him so much that he can barely feel his lips anymore, and long after the couch is probably a lost cause, and they head to the shower, and Shane is so grateful and happy and Ilya looks so good with his hair plastered back under the spray and his nipples hard under Shane’s fingers and rivulets of water coursing down the lines of his pelvis. Shane has to drop to his knees and wrap his mouth around Ilya’s dick, blinking water out of his eyes as he looks up at Ilya from between his legs and takes long pulls off his cock, and swallows the load Ilya shoots to the back of his throat, dreamy and almost mesmerized by how good he feels.

They towel off, and Ilya wraps them both up and crowds Shane into the wall, laughing against his mouth.

“What do I get if San Francisco won the game?” Ilya says, which is how Shane remembers that game six of the MLH finals was tonight and that they almost certainly missed the whole thing.

“Oh, fuck,” he says, and he hurries them out of the bathroom, Ilya whining but following, pulling on the sweatpants that Shane gives him to borrow.

They shuffle out of the bedroom and head back to the couch, which is sticky and disgusting, so Shane makes Ilya wait while he gets a cloth from the kitchen and thoroughly wipes everything down, and then again with a dry one. And they turn on the TV, and it’s showing ads, the same arthritis thing, the guy and the bicycle. The one for the lottery. Shane can’t believe any of it ever worked on him.

“If New York won, I will fuck you again raw,” Ilya says, pulling Shane down against him.

“You’re gonna do that anyway.”

“Mm, yes, probably.”

The broadcast cuts back to the game, or, rather, the post-game celebration, a sea of red New York jerseys on the ice.

Ilya makes an exaggerated noise of horror. “I do not fucking believe this.”

“I told you!” Shane says.

“No, you did not. It was your mom who said this, I think.”

Shane digs an elbow into Ilya’s side, and Ilya grabs for his arm, the good one, and twists them around, straddles Shane along the couch and sinks down over him. Shane finds that he really isn’t that upset. Like, yes, they missed the game, but who cares? Ilya is here, kissing him, and Shane stops listening to the commentators, the background roar of the arena, and lets his mind go blank, his body go soft for Ilya to press closer against him. Opens his mouth for Ilya to slip his tongue inside, just tasting him, and not really thinking or caring about anything else.

The TV continues in the background, all but forgotten.

“Woah!”

“What is going on?”

“You don’t see that every day!”

“Scott Hunter is, oh wow…”

“Huge day for the MLH. Has there ever been a gay player in the league before, Dan?”

Ilya breaks away from his mouth at that, confused. “What the fuck?”

They both look to the screen, where Scott Hunter is standing on the ice with a guy and kissing him very, very passionately.

“Holy shit,” Shane says.

For a moment, they just stare at the TV, at Scott Hunter kissing his mystery boyfriend on the ice on the biggest night of his life, and Shane is sure Ilya must be thinking the same thing as him, that something really huge has just happened, that maybe everything has changed.

And Shane is so, so glad that he remembered, that his fear was not strong enough to overcome him forever. That he can still, maybe, have everything.

“Next year, will be me kissing you on the ice, I think,” Ilya says.

Shane looks at him, at his lovely face. He really loves him, so much. Ilya is looking at him, so fond, maybe thinking the same thing.

Shane can feel his grin is big and stupid, but he doesn’t care. “Oh yeah? You’re going to come to Montreal to watch me win the Cup?”

Ilya digs his fingers into Shane’s side, making him laugh helplessly. “No, I will get you very nice seats at TD Garden for when we win.”

Shane wraps his legs around Ilya’s waist and sinks his fingers into Ilya’s hair and pulls him down, smiling against his lips.

“Promise?”

“Promise,” Ilya says, and kisses him.